  Content-based medical image retrieval can support diagnostic decisions by
clinical experts. Examining similar images may provide clues to the expert to
remove uncertainties in his/her final diagnosis. Beyond conventional feature
descriptors, binary features in different ways have been recently proposed to
encode the image content. A recent proposal is "Radon barcodes" that employ
binarized Radon projections to tag/annotate medical images with content-based
binary vectors, called barcodes. In this paper, MinMax Radon barcodes are
introduced which are superior to "local thresholding" scheme suggested in the
literature. Using IRMA dataset with 14,410 x-ray images from 193 different
classes, the advantage of using MinMax Radon barcodes over \emph{thresholded}
Radon barcodes are demonstrated. The retrieval error for direct search drops by
more than 15\%. As well, SURF, as a well-established non-binary approach, and
BRISK, as a recent binary method are examined to compare their results with
MinMax Radon barcodes when retrieving images from IRMA dataset. The results
demonstrate that MinMax Radon barcodes are faster and more accurate when
applied on IRMA images.
