Efficient and robust large medical image retrieval in mobile cloud computing environment

This paper presents an efficient and robust content-based large medical image retrieval method in mobile Cloud computing environment, called the Mirc. The whole query process of the Mirc is composed of three steps. First, when a clinical user submits a query image I_q, a parallel image set reduction process is conducted at a master node. Then the candidate images are transferred to the slave nodes for a refinement process to obtain the answer set. The answer set is finally transferred to the query node. The proposed method including an priority-based robust image block transmission scheme is specifically designed for solving the instability and the heterogeneity of the mobile cloud environment, and an index-support image set reduction algorithm is introduced for reducing the data transfer cost involved. We also propose a content-aware and bandwidth-conscious multi-resolution-based image data replica selection method and a correlated data caching algorithm to further improve the query performance. The experimental results show that the performance of our approach is both efficient and effective, minimizing the response time by decreasing the network transfer cost while increasing the parallelism of I/O and CPU. © 2014 Published by Elsevier Inc.