In content based image retrieval system, the reliability of retrieval results depends much on the image features used for measuring image similarity. In this paper, a new medical image retrieval method using energy efficient wavelet transform is proposed. Wavelet transformation can also be easily extended to 2-D (image) or 3-D (volume) data by successively applying 1- D transformation on different dimensions. The proposed algorithm was tested using energy efficient wavelet transform and performance analysis was done with Gabor, Bi-orthogonal, and Haar. The retrieval image is the relevance between a query image and any database image, the relevance similarity is ranked according to the closest similar measures computed by the Euclidean distance. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is easy to identify main objects and reduce the influence of background in the image, and thus improve the performance of image retrieval. ©2010 IEEE.