Gesture Interaction for Content--based Medical Image Retrieval

Abstract

Large amounts of medical images are being produced to help physicians in diagnosis and treatment planning. These images are then archived in PACS (Picture Archival and Communication Systems) and usually they are only reused in the context of the same patient during further visits. Medical image retrieval systems allow medical professionals to search for images in institutional archives, the Internet or in the scientific literature. The goal of the search can be in diagnosis but often as well for teaching and research. A large body of research has investigated efficient and effective algorithms to retrieve a set of images to fulfil a specific information need. However, much less research has been done on studying simple and engaging interaction for users of medical image retrieval systems. In this paper we propose an intuitive and engaging web--based interface targeted to be used by a large range of users with gesture control. This interface allows users to retrieve medical images by accessing a system called Parallel Distributed Image Search Engine (ParaDISE), a text-- and content--based image retrieval system. Accepting search with keywords and example images, this interface uses simple gestures to get random example images and mark examples as positive and negative relevance feedback with results being updated after each interaction.