Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
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We present a content-based image retrieval system of medical images of bodies with high elasticity, that is, high inter- and intrasubject variability in shape. The system is based on a rich feature space that is able to describe all the relevant aspects of an image, including local, global, and contextual information. For including relative spatial relations between the structures (i.e., contextual information) we do not need to obtain very accurate segmentations of the image, in contrast to the majority of methods employed for this kind of description. We also obtain invariance to spatial deformations of the same type of object along different instances. This is achieved by applying efficient registrations of the images before their comparison. The incorporation of all these components represents an innovative and powerful way of comparing and retrieving medical images. Validated results are reported on a database of 168 intravascular ultrasound images, showing the appropriateness of our approach for images of such high complexity. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 20: 541–559, 2005.