Content-based indexing and retrieval of uterine cervix images

This work is motivated by the need for visual information management in the growing field of digital libraries and by the increasing information retrieval demands in the domains of medical imaging and telemedicine. We focus on a large database of digitized 35 mm slides of the uterine cervix collected by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), to study the evolution of lesions related to cervical cancer. As a first step towards this goal, we focus on the problem of intelligently labeling (segmenting) regions of medical interest within the cervigram image. We use statistical tools for the segmentation of three tissue types of interest.