MultiWaveMed: a system for medical image retrieval through wavelets transformations

This paper presents the MultiWaveMed system, which is a new software allowing to index and retrieve medical images through the comparison of their texture features. The features are extracted by wavelet transforms, and are organized in feature vectors. The system extracts the image texture features, computes the distance between the query image to all images in the database, through the comparison of their features, and retrieve de n most similar images regarding this kind of feature. The proposed system has implemented both Daubechies and Gabor wavelets. The feature vectors extracted from the images are used to organize the images through access methods, which are the basis to perform the query-by-content operations over the images. The focus of this paper is to show the utility of the wavelet transforms on medical image characterization and their suitability for image indexing and retrieval.