Figure mining for biomedical research

Abstract

Motivation: Figures from biomedical articles contain valuable information difficult to reach without specialized tools. Currently, there is no search engine that can retrieve specific figure types. Results: This study describes a retrieval method that takes advantage of principles in image understanding, text mining and optical character recognition (OCR) to retrieve figure types defined conceptually. A search engine was developed to retrieve tables and figure types to aid computational and experimental research. © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.