At the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, an R&D division of the National Library of Medicine, we are engaged in an effort in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) for biomedical image databases. Toward the goal of developing a functional and significant CBIR capability, we have created a prototype system for image indexing and retrieval which operates on a collection of spine x-rays and associated health survey data. In this paper, we present our prototype system functionality, performance results, ongoing research, and outstanding technical issues.