Overview of the ImageCLEF 2013 medical tasks

In 2013, the tenth edition of the medical task of the Image CLEF benchmark was organized. For the first time, the ImageCLEFmed workshop takes place in the United States of America at the annual AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) meeting even though the task was organized as in previous years in connection with the other ImageCLEF tasks. Like 2012, a subset of the open access collection of PubMed Central was distributed. This year, there were four subtasks: modality classification, compound figure separation, image{based and case{based retrieval. The compound figure separation task was included due to the large number of multipanel images available in the literature and the importance to separate them for targeted retrieval. More compound figures were also included in the modality classification task to make it correspond to the distribution in the full database. The retrieval tasks remained in the same format as in previous years but a larger number of tasks were available for image{based and case{based tasks. This paper presents an analysis of the techniques applied by the ten groups participating 2013 in ImageCLEFmed.