MedGIFT at ImageCLEF 2008

This article describes the participation of the Geneva University Hospitals and the University of Geneva at the 2008 ImageCLEF image retrieval benchmark. We concentrated on the two tasks concerning medical imaging. The visual information analysis is based on the GNU Image Finding Tool (GIFT). Other information such as textual information and aspect ratio are integrated to improve the results. The main techniques are the same as in past years, with a little tuning to slightly improve results. For the visual tasks it becomes clear that the baseline GIFT runs do not have the same performance as more sophisticated modern techniques do. GIFT can be seen as a baseline for the visual retrieval as it has been used for the past five years in ImageCLEF. Due to time constraints no optimizations could be performed and no relevance feedback was used, usually one of the strong points of GIFT.