Enhancing biomedical search interfaces with images

MOTIVATION: Figures in biomedical papers communicate essential information with the potential to identify relevant documents in biomedical and clinical settings. However, academic search interfaces mainly search over text fields. RESULTS: We describe a search system for biomedical documents that leverages image modalities and an existing index server. We integrate a problem-specific taxonomy of image modalities and image-based data into a custom search system. Our solution features a front-end interface to enhance classical document search results with image-related data, including page thumbnails, figures, captions and image-modality information. We demonstrate the system on a subset of the CORD-19 document collection. A quantitative evaluation demonstrates higher precision and recall for biomedical document retrieval. A qualitative evaluation with domain experts further highlights our solution’s benefits to biomedical search. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: A demonstration is available at https://runachay.evl.uic.edu/scholar. Our code and image models can be accessed via github.com/uic-evl/bio-search. The dataset is continuously expanded.