Texture information plays an important role in object recognition and classification. To perform an accurate classification, the texture feature used in the classification must be highly discriminative. This paper presents a novel texture descriptor for texture-based image retrieval and its application in Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system for Emphysema classification. The texture descriptor is based on the combination of local surrounding neighborhood difference and centralized neighborhood difference and is named as Combined Neighborhood Difference (CND). The local differences of surrounding neighborhood difference and centralized neighborhood difference between pixels are compared and converted into binary codewords. Then binomial factor is assigned to the codewords in order to convert them into high discriminative unique values. The distribution of these unique values is computed and used as the texture feature vectors. The texture classification accuracies using Outex and Brodatz dataset show that CND achieves an average of 92.5%, whereas LBP, LND and Gabor filter achieve 89.3%, 90.7% and 83.6%, respectively. The implementations of CND in the computer-aided diagnosis of Emphysema is also presented in this paper.