Content-based X-ray image retrieval using fusion of local neighboring patterns and deep features for lung disease detection.

This paper introduces a Content-Based Medical Image Retrieval (CBMIR) system for detecting and retrieving lung disease cases to assist doctors and radiologists in clinical decision-making. The system combines texture-based features using Local Binary Patterns (LBP) with deep learning-based features extracted from pretrained CNN models, including VGG-16, DenseNet121, and InceptionV3. The objective is to identify the optimal fusion of texture and deep features to enhance the image retrieval performance. Various similarity measures, including Euclidean, Manhattan, and cosine similarities, were evaluated, with Cosine Similarity demonstrating the best performance, achieving an average precision of 65.5%. For COVID-19 cases, VGG-16 achieved a precision of 52.5%, while LBP performed best for the normal class with 85% precision. The fusion of LBP, VGG-16, and DenseNet121 excelled in pneumonia cases, with a precision of 93.5%. Overall, VGG-16 delivered the highest average precision of 74.0% across all classes, followed by LBP at 72.0%. The fusion of texture (LBP) and deep features from all CNN models achieved 86% accuracy for the retrieval of the top 10 images, supporting healthcare professionals in making more informed clinical decisions.