Similarity Searching of Medical Image Data in Distributed Systems

Abstract

In this paper, the authors propose a method for medical image retrieval in distributed systems to facilitate telemedicine. The proposed framework can be used by a network of healthcare centers, where some can be remotely located, assisting in diagnosis without the necessary transfer of patients. Security and confidentiality issues of medical data are expected, which are handled at the local site following the procedures and protocols of each institution. To make the search more effective, the authors introduce a distributed index based on features that are extracted from each image. Considering network bandwidth limitations and other restrictions that are associated with handling medical data, the images are processed locally and a pointer is distributed in the network. For the distribution of this pointer, the authors propose a function that maps the pointer of each image to a node with similar contents.