The Medical Image Retrieval Task

This chapter describes the medical image retrieval task of ImageCLEF, the image retrieval track of the CLEF. The medical task has been running for six consecutive years, beginning in 2004. Participation has increased over the years to over 45 registrations for 2010. The query topics have also evolved over the years from a starting point of using images only, via clear visual and textual information needs, and now towards case descriptions to find similar cases. The primary goal of the task is to provide challenging research questions to the scientific community to advance medical visual information retrieval on standard databases. Databases have increased significantly in size over the years to keep pace with the growing demand. The results show that textual information retrieval of images is now much further developed and produces much better results than in past years. However, visual retrieval components such as pre–classifying the images (i.e. modality detection) or improving early precision of the retrieval results can lead to an overall improvement in retrieval performance in specific domains.