Effective and efficient content-based similarity retrieval of large lung CT images based on WSSLN model

The in-depth combination and application of AI technology and medical imaging, especially high- definition CT imaging technology, make accurate diagnosis and treatment possible. Retrieving similar CT image(CI)s to an input one from the large-scale CI database of labeled diseases is helpful to realize a precise computer-aided diagnosis. In this paper, we take lung CI as an example and propose progressive content-based similarity retrieval(CBSR) method of the lung CIs based on a Weakly Supervised Similarity Learning Network (WSSLN) model. Two enabling techniques (i.e., the WSSLN model and the distance- based pruning scheme) are proposed to facilitate the CBSR processing of the large lung CIs. The main result of our paper is that, our approach is about 45% more effective than the state-of-the-art methods in terms of the mean average precision(mAP). Moreover, for the retrieval efficiency, the WSSLN-based CBSR method is about 150% more efficient than the sequential scan.