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

Different software engineering and artificial intelligence methods can be used to design Internet retrieval of prototypical medical images. We used the 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 definition of a similarity measure between the descriptions of cases we propose a flexible querying of the case-base and a quantitative browsing among cases through similarity links. The resemblance rates provided by the system argue for the quality and the relevancy of the retrieved data. The flexibility of the querying process is robust to missing information and could be adapted to a daily practice. The CBR approach is a promising method for a clinical relevant and an efficient retrieval of reference images and diagnosis clues through Internet.