PhD proposal

I just finished my PhD proposal regarding medical case retrieval (available as PDF). Here is the abstract:

The proposed PhD project addresses the problem of medical case retrieval (MCR), where a medical case is represented by a multimedia document describing a certain disease or a patient’s history. The ImageCLEF evaluation campaign poses a yearly MCR task using a heterogeneous dataset of more than 75,000 medical publications consisting of text and images. The best results achieved by participants of the ImageCLEF MCR task in 2012 are moderate and call for improvement. Interestingly, approaches based on visual retrieval perform significantly worse than text-only retrieval, even if combined with text retrieval. This project therefore aims at designing an MCR model that is able to deliver a substantially better retrieval performance on the ImageCLEF dataset. Moreover, the potential of further improvement by leveraging the feedback of medical expert users for long-term learning will be investigated.