Automated Anatomic Labeling Architecture for Content Discovery in Medical Imaging Repositories

The combination of textual data with visual features is known to enhance medical image search capabilities. However, the most advanced imaging archives today only index the studies' available meta-data, often containing limited amounts of clinically useful information. This work proposes an anatomic labeling architecture, integrated with an open source archive software, for improved multimodal content discovery in real-world medical imaging repositories. The proposed solution includes a technical specification for classifiers in an extensible medical imaging archive, a classification database for querying over the extracted information, and a set of proof-of-concept convolutional neural network classifiers for identifying the presence of organs in computed tomography scans. The system automatically extracts the anatomic region features, which are saved in the proposed database for later consumption by multimodal querying mechanisms. The classifiers were evaluated with cross-validation, yielding a best F1-score of 96% and an average accuracy of 97%. We expect these capabilities to become common-place in production environments in the future, as automated detection solutions improve in terms of accuracy, computational performance, and interoperability.