Multi-disciplinary Modality Classification for Medical Images

Modality is a key facet in medical image retrieval, as a user is likely interested in only one of e.g. radiology images, flowcharts, and pathology photos. While assessing image modality is trivial for humans, reliable automatic methods are required to deal with large un-annotated image bases, such as figures taken from the millions of scientific publications. We present a multi-disciplinary approach to tackle the classification problem by combining image features, meta-data, textual and referential information. Our system achieved an accuracy of 96.86 % in cross-validation on the ImageCLEF 2011 training dataset having 18 imbalanced modality classes, and an accuracy of 90.2 % on the ImageCLEF 2010 dataset having 8 well-balanced modality classes. We evaluate the importance of the individual feature sets in detail, and provide an error analysis pointing at weaknesses of our method and obstacles in the classification task. For the benefit of the image classification community, we make the results of our feature extraction methods publicly available at http://categorizer.tmit.bme.hu/~illes/imageclef2011modality.