An intelligent system for integrating semantic and iconic features for image retrieval

The I-Browse project aimed to develop a prototype system to provide facilities for supporting intelligent retrieval of medical images through a combination of iconic and semantic content. The resulting prototype system, I-Browse, is able to extract and represent relevant iconic and semantic information from input images and to automatically generate textual annotations for images. Techniques were also developed for retrieving relevant images from the database given either an example image query or a textual query. The facilities provided by I-Browse were evaluated by medical colleagues and judged to have the potential of alleviating some of the time-consuming tasks that doctors now have to perform daily and providing a means of identifying previously unknown relationships between visual appearance and histological events.