Research and applications: Ontology-guided organ detection to retrieve web images of disease manifestation: towards the construction of a consumer-based health image library |
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Authors: | Yang Chen Xiaofeng Ren Guo-Qiang Zhang Rong Xu |
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Institution: | 1.Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Case Western Reserve University School of Engineering, Cleveland, Ohio, USA;2.Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing, Seattle, Washington, USA;3.Division of Medical Informatics, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio, USA |
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Abstract: | BackgroundVisual information is a crucial aspect of medical knowledge. Building a comprehensive medical image base, in the spirit of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), would greatly benefit patient education and self-care. However, collection and annotation of such a large-scale image base is challenging.ObjectiveTo combine visual object detection techniques with medical ontology to automatically mine web photos and retrieve a large number of disease manifestation images with minimal manual labeling effort.MethodsAs a proof of concept, we first learnt five organ detectors on three detection scales for eyes, ears, lips, hands, and feet. Given a disease, we used information from the UMLS to select affected body parts, ran the pretrained organ detectors on web images, and combined the detection outputs to retrieve disease images.ResultsCompared with a supervised image retrieval approach that requires training images for every disease, our ontology-guided approach exploits shared visual information of body parts across diseases. In retrieving 2220 web images of 32 diseases, we reduced manual labeling effort to 15.6% while improving the average precision by 3.9% from 77.7% to 81.6%. For 40.6% of the diseases, we improved the precision by 10%.ConclusionsThe results confirm the concept that the web is a feasible source for automatic disease image retrieval for health image database construction. Our approach requires a small amount of manual effort to collect complex disease images, and to annotate them by standard medical ontology terms. |
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Keywords: | Image Retrieval Object Detection Ontology |
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