Content Based Medical Image Retrieval-A Study

Image retrieval is a technique to find similar images from an image archive by their textual or visual contents. Images can be retrieved from huge databases either by using text annotations or by analyzing the content of the images, in which case it is called Content Based Image retrieval (CBIR). CBIR can be applied to various applications like the Internet, healthcare industries, etc. CBIR is considered challenging in the medical field because the characteristics of medical images differ significantly from other general-purpose images. In the last decade, content-based image retrieval methods have been widely studied in different application domains and particularly, research in the medical field has taken special interest. This paper presents a highlight of recent researches in Content Based Medical Image Retrieval (CBMIR), techniques and trends, key issues and limitations.