September 01, 2008

Yale Image Finder (YIF): a new search engine for retrieving biomedical images

BY Dr. Keith J. Kaplan

In case you haven’t seen this there is a publicly accessible search engine featuring a new way of retrieving biomedical images.  Some of the comments I have not been overwhelming thus far.  I ran a search for "Barrett’s esophagus", a common condition and received 5 "images" including "images" with nothing more than plain text and graphs about gene expression and personal feedback from researchers about their interests. 

The same search on google images produced several dozen clinical, gross and microscopic images on the first 4 pages I scanned with a bevy of information for patients and physicians alike. 

So far, I am not impressed but will consider it another resource as it matures and refines its algorithms and database.

Here is an abbreviated abstract from a mention of this I came across:

The Yale Image Finder (YIF) is a publicly accessible search engine featuring a new way of retrieving biomedical images and associated papers based on the text carried inside the images.

Image queries can also be issued against the image caption, as well as words in the associated paper abstract and title. A typical search scenario using YIF is as follows: a user provides few search keywords and the most relevant images are returned and presented in the form of thumbnails. Users can click on the image of interest to retrieve the high resolution image.

In addition, the search engine will provide two types of related images: those that appear in the same paper, and those from other papers with similar image content. Retrieved images link back to their source papers, allowing users to find related papers starting with an image of interest. Currently, YIF has indexed over 140,000 images from over 34,000 open access biomedical journal papers.

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