2008 was the fifth year for the medical image retrieval task of ImageCLEF, one of the most popular tracks within CLEF. Participation continued to increase in 2008. A total of 15 groups submitted 111 valid runs. Several requests for data access were also received after the registration deadline. The most significant change in 2008 was the use of a new database containing images from the medical literature. These images, part of the Goldminer collection, were from the RSNA journals Radiology and Radiographics. Besides the images, the figure captions and the part of the caption referring to a particular sub figure were supplied to the participants. Access to the full text articles in HTML was also provided, as was each article's Medline PMID (PubMed Identifier). An article's PMID could be used to obtain the officially assigned MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms. Unlike previous years, this year's collection was entirely in English, as it was obtained from English-langua...