Content-based and metadata retrieval in medical image database

The need for systems that can store, represent and provide efficient retrieval facilities for images of particular interest is becoming very high in medicine. In this respect, a lot of work has been done to integrate image data in standard data processing environments. The two different approaches that are used for the representation of images are the meta-data and the content-based approaches. Users in medicine need queries that use both content-based and meta-data representations of images or salient objects. In this paper, we first present a global image data model that supports both meta-data and low-level descriptions of images and their salient objects. This allows us to make multi-criteria image retrieval (context-, semantic- and content-based queries). Then, we present an image data repository model that captures all the data described in the model and permits the integration of heterogeneous operations in a DBMS. In particular, content-based operations (content-based join and selection) in combination with traditional ones can be carried out using our model.