Deep Learning for Content-Based Medical Image Retrieval in Picture Archiving and Communication Systems for Brain Tumor Detection: Algorithm Development and Validation

Background: Advances in medical imaging have led to massive archives, yet navigating these datasets remains challenging due to the limitations of traditional text-based search engines. While content-based medical image retrieval (CBMIR) offers a visual feature-based solution to enhance clinical workflows and research, its operational integration into picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) remains a significant bottleneck. Despite the progress in deep learning for feature extraction, CBMIR tools are rarely integrated and effectively implemented within existing radiology information systems due to complex protocol barriers. Objective: To address these challenges, this study develops a CBMIR system meticulously designed to cater to 7 distinct types of brain tumors as seen in brain magnetic resonance images. Our system is tailored to assist radiologists and health care professionals in efficiently retrieving pertinent historical medical images, thereby providing quantitative decision support for radiologists and facilitating evidence-based case comparison, with the potential to improve retrieval efficiency and clinical workflow, rather than directly enhancing diagnostic accuracy. Methods: The dataset used in this study was collected from a single medical center and is not publicly available. The core innovation is a state-of-the-art deep learning-based feature extraction algorithm specifically engineered for the CBMIR system. We use GoogLeNet as the primary architecture, incorporating generalized mean pooling to capture nuanced local features and an embedding layer for dimension reduction. Crucially, we address the integration gap by harmonizing 2 open-source projects to successfully embed the CBMIR system into a functional PACS environment via standard protocols. Results: The image dataset contains 658 participants with 15,873 images collected from 2000 to 2017. The empirical findings of our research demonstrate the performance and robustness of the proposed CBMIR system. Our system achieves a remarkable mean average precision score of 89.16% and an equally impressive Precision@10 score of 94.08%. These metrics affirm the system's efficacy in retrieving relevant medical images. Furthermore, we successfully integrate the CBMIR system into a PACS by successfully harmonizing 2 open-source projects. Conclusions: This study presents the design and implementation of a PACS-integrated CBMIR system for brain magnetic resonance imaging, and the experimental results demonstrate that the system can achieve efficient and accurate image retrieval within a clinical workflow.