Content-based image retrieval for medical diagnosis using fuzzy clustering and deep learning

Brain tumors are one of the most threatening causes of death worldwide. Neuroradiologists widely use Magnetic Resonance Imaging as a golden standard non-invasive imaging method for diagnosing Glioma grades. Brain tumor diagnosis based on radiology images is tedious and highly subjective to intra and inter-observer variability; it adversely affects therapeutic planning. Better medical treatment can be provided relating to similar past cases if relevant images are retrieved from an extensive medical image database. Content-Based Image Retrieval systems are potent image tools for dealing with such massive datasets. In a CBIR system, accurate classification and retrieval of similar pathological images can be effectively automated by utilising Convolutional Neural Network-based feature extraction methods. This paper presents a Content-Based Medical Image Retrieval pipeline on a medical domain using the CNN model for feature extraction and the clustering method used to index the feature map database. The proposed system applies a Multi-level Gain-based feature selection to reduce the dimensionality of the feature vectors obtained from the pre-trained CNN models. The experiment follows five-fold cross-validation on BraTS 2018 and 2020 datasets. The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art MRI brain image retrieval performance with a mean Average Precision and Precision@10 of 98.15% and 97.62%, respectively. The results prove the proposed method’s effectiveness and validate its clinical application.