Yale Image Finder (and UC Berkeley’s BioText)
The Yale Image Finder searches PubMed Central articles for images.
That sounded not only like a good idea, but a good idea I’d heard before. In July of 2007, I posted about UC Berkeley’s BioText1, which seems to already search PubMed Central for images. Why build another tool to do the same thing?
The answer is found in this Bioinformatics article
The authors note they are aware of BioText, but that…
…we are not aware of a biomedical search engine that can retrieve images by searching the text within biomedical images. This offers several advantages over searching over captions alone. First, captions may not contain all the textual information that is contained in the images. Second, image texts are usually very specific, allowing for precise matching of images with related images.
Neat. So Yale’s tool does OCR on text appearing in images and adds that text to its searching index of images in PubMed Central. Cool.
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February 12th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
definitely cool
February 12th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
That is very cool. Thanks for pointing it out, David.