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Updated: Jun 14, 2026

Guidelines and Experience Using Imaging Biomarker Explorer (IBEX) for Radiomics
Published on: January 8, 2018
Content-based image retrieval in radiology: current status and future directions.
Ceyhun Burak Akgül1, Daniel L Rubin, Sandy Napel
1Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department, Volumetric Analysis and Visualization Lab., Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey.
Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) can aid radiologists by finding similar medical images for decision support. Integrating pixel and metadata analysis in CBIR systems offers significant potential for advancing diagnostic radiology.
Area of Science:
- Medical imaging analysis
- Radiology informatics
Background:
- Diagnostic radiology relies on interpreting complex medical images.
- Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) offers potential for decision support by identifying similar images in large archives.
- Current CBIR applications are limited in radiology despite advances in nonmedical domains.
Purpose of the Study:
- To review CBIR methods and systems for their application in radiology.
- To identify nonmedical CBIR approaches translatable to radiology.
- To explore the integration of pixel-based and metadata-based features for enhanced medical image retrieval.
Main Methods:
- Survey of existing CBIR techniques and systems.
- Analysis of challenges specific to radiology images (varied, rich, subtle features).
- Examination of opportunities presented by radiology metadata.
Main Results:
- Radiology images present unique challenges for similarity assessment compared to consumer images.
- Radiology archives contain rich semantic metadata not fully utilized by current CBIR.
- Combining pixel and metadata analysis is key for advancing medical CBIR.
Conclusions:
- CBIR has substantial potential to become an important tool in radiology practice.
- Integrating diverse feature analysis can overcome current limitations.
- Future CBIR systems should leverage both image content and associated metadata for improved diagnostic support.
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