SPIRS: A Web-based image retrieval system for large biomedical databases

Purpose: With the increasing use of images in disease research, education, and clinical medicine, the need for methods that effectively archive, query, and retrieve these images by their content is underscored. This paper describes the implementation of a Web-based retrieval system called SPIRS (Spine Pathology & Image Retrieval System), which permits exploration of a large biomedical database of digitized spine X-ray images and data from a national health survey using a combination of visual and textual queries. Methods: SPIRS is a generalizable framework that consists of four components: a client applet, a gateway, an indexing and retrieval system, and a database of images and associated text data. The prototype system is demonstrated using text and imaging data collected as part of the second U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES II). Users search the image data by providing a sketch of the vertebral outline or selecting an example vertebral image and some relevant text parameters. Pertinent pathology on the image/sketch can be annotated and weighted to indicate importance. Results: During the course of development, we explored different algorithms to perform functions such as segmentation, indexing, and retrieval. Each algorithm was tested individually and then implemented as part of SPIRS. To evaluate the overall system, we first tested the system's ability to return similar vertebral shapes from the database given a query shape. Initial evaluations using visual queries only (no text) have shown that the system achieves up to 68% accuracy in finding images in the database that exhibit similar abnormality type and severity. Relevance feedback mechanisms have been shown to increase accuracy by an additional 22% after three iterations. While we primarily demonstrate this system in the context of retrieving vertebral shape, our framework has also been adapted to search a collection of 100,000 uterine cervix images to study the progression of cervical cancer. Conclusions: SPIRS is automated, easily accessible, and integratable with other complementary information retrieval systems. The system supports the ability for users to intuitively query large amounts of imaging data by providing visual examples and text keywords and has beneficial implications in the areas of research, education, and patient care.