Term dependency extraction using rule-based Bayesian Network for medical image retrieval

Text-Based Medical Image Retrieval (TBMIR) has been known to be successful in retrieving medical images with textual descriptions. Usually, these descriptions are very brief and cannot express the whole visual content of the image in words, hence negatively affect the retrieval performance. One of the solutions offered in the literature is to form a Bayesian Network thesaurus taking advantage of some medical terms extracted from the image datasets. Despite the interestingness of this solution, it is not efficient as it is highly related to the co-occurrence measure, the layer arrangement and the arc directions. A significant drawback of the co-occurrence measure is the generation of a lot of uninteresting co-occurring terms. Several studies applied the association rules mining and its measures to discover the correlation between the terms. In this paper, we propose a new efficient association Rule Based Bayesian Network (R2BN) model for TBMIR using updated medically-dependent features (MDF) based on Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). The MDF are a set of medical terms that refers to the imaging modalities, the image color, the searched object dimension, etc. The proposed model presents the association rules mined from MDF in the form of Bayesian Network model. Then, it exploits the association rule measures (support, confidence, and lift) to prune the Bayesian Network model for efficient computation. The proposed R2BN model is combined with a literature probabilistic model to predict the relevance of an image to a given query. Experiments are carried out with ImageCLEF medical retrieval task collections from 2009 to 2013. Results show that our proposed model enhances significantly the image retrieval accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art retrieval models. •Proposing a Rule-Based Bayesian Network method to extract the term dependency.•Addressing the problem of short medical image descriptions in the retrieval process.•Utilising the UMLS Metathesaurus to expand the medically-dependent feature thesaurus.•Carrying out experiments using five medical ImageCLEF Medical Retrieval datasets.