Multimodal medical case retrieval using Bayesian networks and the Dezert-Smarandache theory

In this paper, we present a Case Based Reasoning (CBR) system for the retrieval of medical cases made up of a series of images with semantic information (such as the patient age, sex and medical history). Indeed, medical experts generally need varied sources of information, which might be incomplete, uncertain and conflicting, to diagnose a pathology. Consequently, we derive a retrieval framework from Bayesian networks and the Dezert-Smarandache theory, which are well suited to handle those problems. The system is designed so that heterogeneous sources of information can be integrated in the system: in particular images, indexed by their digital content, and symbolic information. The method is evaluated on a classified diabetic retinopathy database. On this database, results are promising: the retrieval precision at five reaches 80.5%, which is almost twice as good as the retrieval of single images alone.