title: Indexing the medical open access literature for textual and content-based visual retrieval.
abstract: Over the past few years an increasing amount of scientific journals have been created in an open access format. Particularly in the medical field the number of openly accessible journals is enormous making a wide body of knowledge available for analysis and retrieval. Part of the trend towards open access publications can be linked to funding bodies such as the NIH1(National Institutes of Health) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF2) requiring funded projects to make all articles of funded research available publicly. This article describes an approach to make part of the knowledge of open access journals available for retrieval including the textual information but also the images contained in the articles. For this goal all articles of 24 journals related to medical informatics and medical imaging were crawled from the web pages of BioMed Central. Text and images of the PDF (Portable Document Format) files were indexed separately and a web-based retrieval interface allows for searching via keyword queries or by visual similarity queries. Starting point for a visual similarity query can be an image on the local hard disk that is uploaded or any image found via the textual search. Search for similar documents is also possible.
authors.affiliation: University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, Sierre, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Ivan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Eggel
authors.forename: Henning
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Müller
mesh_terms: D000043:Abstracting and Indexing; D003952:Diagnostic Imaging; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D020407:Internet; D008490:Medical Informatics; D009316:National Institutes of Health (U.S.); D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D011873:Radiology Information Systems; D012984:Software; D014481:United States