IDEM: a Web application of case-based reasoning in histopathology

Different software engineering and artificial intelligence methods can be u sed to design Internet retrieval of prototypical medical images. We used th e case-based reasoning (CBR) approach to provide an 'intelligent' access to a collection of illustrated medical cases through the Internet. This paper presents a Web interface for the CBR system IDEM(image and diagnosis from examples in medicine) in the domain of breast pathology. Thanks to the defi nition of a similarity measure between the descriptions of cases we propose a flexible querying of the case-base and a quantitative browsing among cas es through similarity links. The resemblance rates provided by the system a rgue for the quality and the relevancy of the retrieved data. The flexibili ty of the querying process is robust to missing information and could be ad apted to a daily practice. The CBR approach is a promising method for a cli nical relevant and an efficient retrieval of reference images and diagnosis clues through Internet. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved .