Figure mining for biomedical research

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. AVAILABILITY http://iossifovlab.cshl.edu/figurome/.