Content-based medical image retrieval with metric learning via rank correlation

Abstract

A novel content-based medical image retrieval method with metric learning via rank correlation is proposed in this paper. A new rank correlation measure is proposed to learn a metric encoding the pairwise similarity between images via direct optimization. Our method has been evaluated with a large population-based dataset composed of 5000 slit-lamp images with different nuclear cataract severities. Experimental results and statistical analysis demonstrate the superiority of our method over several popular metric learning methods in content-based slit-lamp image retrieval. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.