1. The document proposes a new fuzzy compact composite descriptor (BTDH) for content-based medical image indexing and retrieval. 2. BTDH uses both brightness and texture features in a compact 128-bin vector to describe images, with size under 48 bytes per image. 3. In experiments on 5000 images with 120 queries, BTDH achieved better retrieval accuracy than other descriptors, with an Average Normalized Modified Retrieval Rank of 0.272.