Open your eyes to the power of image-based online searching

2012

Challenge

Illustrations in medical literature contribute greatly to understanding complex biomedical concepts—for researchers, scientists, and the lay public alike. However, bibliographic databases are mostly text-based; hence the need for systems that deliver citations enriched by visual material, for example, radiographic images, photographs, sketches, graphs, or charts.

Advance

IRP researchers Dina Demner-Fushman, M.D., Ph.D., and Sameer Antani, Ph.D., led the development of Open-i (pronounced “open eye”), a novel open-access biomedical image search engine. In addition to image search capabilities, Open-i also provides outcome—or “take away”—statements extracted from a collection of 250,000 open access articles and 1 million illustrations in the biomedical literature hosted at the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central^® repository.

Impact

As the first production-quality system of its kind in the biomedical domain, Open-i enables medical professionals and the public to access both highly relevant visual information and key outcome statements from biomedical publications. Just a few months after public release, the site had more than 5,000 unique visitors per day and was ranked 382nd in the world (among 30 million Web sites) .