Multimedia Information Retrieval from Ophthalmic Digital Archives

During a medical examination, clinicians build a health record containing all available information about their patient. A promising way to support their decisions is to retrieve similar patient records from a medical archive. Confronted to similar cases, clinicians may confirm or revise their decisions by analogy reasoning. In order to retrieve patient records, two challenges need to be addressed. First, how to characterize complex elements in patient records (images, videos, etc.)? Second, how to combine heterogeneous elements in these records (demographic and clinical data, images, videos, etc.) in order to define clinically-relevant similarity metrics? After a short review of content-based image, video or health record retrieval techniques, this chapter presents the solutions we have developed for two applications in ophthalmology: computer-aided retinal diagnosis and computer-aided eye surgery. Medical archives are a great asset to develop the medical decision supports of tomorrow. Thanks to major advances in information retrieval, network data storage (cloud), with related topics such as security, virtually any medical decision problem can benefit from information stored in medical archives.