Medical Image Retrieval Challenge Evaluation

This is the archival Web site for the ImageCLEF Medical Image Retrieval Challenge Evaluation for the years 2005-2008 that was funded by Grant ITR-0325160 of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Information Technology Research (ITR) program. The official Web site for the Challenge Evaluation going forward is part of the larger Web site http://www.imageclef.org/. This Web site here should only be viewed as an archive for activity from 2005-2008.

ImageCLEFmed is part of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF), a benchmarking event for multilingual information retrieval held annually since 2000. CLEF first began as a track in the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC). A multilingual image retrieval track started in 2003, and in 2004 a medical image retrieval track was added. More information about ImageCLEF can be found on its main Web site.

Image or multimedia retrieval is interesting for the domain of cross-language information retrieval as the media such as images are inherently almost insensitive to language. The main goal of ImageCLEFmed is to improve the retrieval of medical images from heterogeneous and multilingual document collections containing images as well as text. Many collections exist on the World Wide Web that contain images as well as multilingual texts. However, the retrieval of images is an often-neglected topic in the information retrieval domain. In particular, hospitals produce an enormous amount of visual data but tools to manage these images and videos are scarce and exist currently only as research prototypes.

Data, Results, and Publications

2008 Track

Protocol

Consolidated Collection

This collection consists the image collection and topics used in ImageCLEFmed 2005-2007 merged into one single new collection, with relevance judgments done for all topics based on all collections. A paper in Journal of Digital Imaging has been published describing the collection. We ask that any further research done with the collections of 2005-2007 be done with the single consolidated collection. The collection is available to all CLEF participants.

Data

2007 Track

Protocol
Data - all files used for 2007 (included here for archival purposes; use consoldiated collection data instead)
Results - summary of 2007 results
Overview paper - from Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science (in press)
License agreement - for use of mypacs.net data; groups must sign and send this to Henning Müller before getting access to the data

2006 Track

Protocol
Data - 2005 and 2006 images and annotations are the same; topics are different (included here for archival purposes; use consoldiated collection data instead)
Results - Excel spreadsheet with summary results
Overview paper - from Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science (7th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2006, Vol. 4730, 595-608)
Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about ImageCLEF

2005 Track

Protocol
Data - 2005 and 2006 images and annotations are the same; topics are different (included here for archival purposes; use consoldiated collection data instead)
Overview papers - from JAMIA (13(5): 488-496) and Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science (6th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evalution Forum, CLEF 2005, Vol. 4022, 535-557)

Organizers		Sponsors
	Henning Müller University and Hospitals of Geneva Geneva, Switzerland Email: henning.mueller@sim.hcuge.ch Web: http://www.sim.hcuge.ch/medgift/02_Henning_EN.htm		Semantic Interoperability and Data Mining in Biomedicine SemanticMining Network of Excellence 507505
	William Hersh Oregon Health &Science University Portland, OR, USA Email: hersh@ohsu.edu Web: http://www.billhersh.info/ Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer Oregon Health &Science University Portland, OR, USA Email: kalpathy@ohsu.edu		Eurpoean Union Sixth Framework Program Information Society Technologies
	Paul Clough Sheffield University, UK Email: p.d.clough@sheffield.ac.uk Web: http://ir.shef.ac.uk/cloughie/		National Science Foundation (U.S.) Information Technology Research Grant 0325160

How can I participate in ImageCLEF?

You can register for ImageCLEF by following the links on the CLEF Web site. Once you have registered and completed the appropriate copyright and declaration forms, you will be able to download the data collections. There is also an email list that you can join following the instructions on the ImageCLEF Web site.

Organizing Group

Pictured below are the original organizers of ImageCLEF, pictured at the CLEF 2005 meeting in Vienna, Austria. (Not pictured is Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer of Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR, USA.)

Team

From left to right are:

Michael Grubinger - Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
Thomas Lehmann - RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
Paul Clough - Sheffield University, Sheffield, England
Henning Müller - University and Hospitals of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Thomas Deselaers - RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
Bill Hersh - Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR, USA
Jeffery Jensen - Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR, USA

Last updated - 22 December 2008, William Hersh