Medical Image Retrieval with Relevance Feedback via Pairwise Constraint Propagation

Relevance feedback is an effective tool to bridge the gap between superficial image contents and medically-relevant sense in content-based medical image retrieval. In this paper, we propose an interactive medical image search framework based on pairwise constraint propagation. The basic idea is to obtain pairwise constraints from user feedback and propagate them to the entire image set to reconstruct the similarity matrix, and then rank medical images on this new manifold. In contrast to most of the algorithms that only concern manifold structure, the proposed method integrates pairwise constraint information in a feedback procedure and resolves the small sample size and the asymmetrical training typically in relevance feedback. We also introduce a long-term feedback strategy for our retrieval tasks. Experiments on two medical image datasets indicate the proposed approach can significantly improve the performance of medical image retrieval. The experiments also indicate that the proposed approach outperforms previous relevance feedback models.