Content based COVID-19 image retrieval system using local histogram equalization and deep convolutional neural network

Abstract

Doctors play a critical role in interpreting medical images as part of their core responsibilities. They need to find comparable examples that can assist in making informed decisions, especially when encountering ambiguous visuals. Traditionally, Systems such as content-based medical image retrieval (CBMIR) have been used for this. The proposed method employs a novel technique, local histogram equalization (LHE) for preprocessing, transfer learning-based convolutional neural network to extract the representative features with Manhattan and Euclidean distance metrics to assess how similar the query image and database image are to one another. This model is trained on a standard dataset namely Chest X-Ray images. Top-k, Precision and Recall measure is employed to assess system performance. From the results, the suggested enhanced convolutional neural network (CNN) model demonstrates significantly superior performance in the top 10 retrieval rates of 97.13% for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), 96.84% for normal, 82.63% for pneumonia-bacterial, and 81.72% for pneumonia-viral and precision@recall10 of 93.14% for COVID-19, 91.88% for normal, 77.84% for pneumonia-bacterial and 74.71% for pneumonia-viral.