“MouseScholar: Evaluating an Image+Text Search System for Biocuration”, Juan Trelles Trabucco, Carla Floricel, Cecilia Arighi, Hagit Shatkay, Daniela Raciti, Martin Ringwald, and G. Elisabeta Marai is an accepted paper at 2023 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (IEEE BIBM 2023). Of the 1084 paper submissions submitted to BIBM this year, only 211 regular papers were accepted (acceptance rate: 19.5%).

Project Description:
In this work, we instantiate and evaluate a first-in-kind, hybrid image+text document search system for biocuration (the process of analyzing biological or biomedical articles to organize biological data into data repositories using taxonomies and ontologies). The system, MouseScholar, leverages an image modality taxonomy derived in collaboration with biocurators, in addition to figure segmentation, and classifiers components as a back-end and a streamlined front-end interface to search and present document results. We formally evaluated the system with ten biocurators on a mouse genome informatics biocuration dataset and collected feedback. The results demonstrate the benefits of blending text and image information when presenting scientific articles for biocuration.

Congratulations EVL research team on being accepted for publication with this prestigious Conference!