Medical image identification methods: A review

Abstract

The identification of medical images is an essential task in computer-aided diagnosis, medical image retrieval and mining. Medical image data mainly include electronic health record data and gene information data, etc. Although intelligent imaging provided a good scheme for medical image analysis over traditional methods that rely on the handcrafted features, it remains challenging due to the diversity of imaging modalities and clinical pathologies. Many medical image identification methods provide a good scheme for medical image analysis. The concepts pertinent of methods, such as the machine learning, deep learning, convolutional neural networks, transfer learning, and other image processing technologies for medical image are analyzed and summarized in this paper. We reviewed these recent studies to provide a comprehensive overview of applying these methods in various medical image analysis tasks, such as object detection, image classification, image registration, segmentation, and other tasks. Especially, we emphasized the latest progress and contributions of different methods in medical image analysis, which are summarized base on different application scenarios, including classification, segmentation, detection, and image registration. In addition, the applications of different methods are summarized in different application area, such as pulmonary, brain, digital pathology, brain, skin, lung, renal, breast, neuromyelitis, vertebrae, and musculoskeletal, etc. Critical discussion of open challenges and directions for future research are finally summarized. Especially, excellent algorithms in computer vision, natural language processing, and unmanned driving will be applied to medical image recognition in the future.

Keywords: Classification; Deep learning; Medical image identification; Transfer learning.