Saliency-Enhanced Content-Based Image Retrieval for Diagnosis Support in Dermatology Consultation: Reader Study.

Background: Previous research studies have demonstrated that medical content image retrieval can play an important role by assisting dermatologists in skin lesion diagnosis. However, current state-of-the-art approaches have not been adopted in routine consultation, partly due to the lack of interpretability limiting trust by clinical users.

Objective: This study developed a new image retrieval architecture for polarized or dermoscopic imaging guided by interpretable saliency maps.