An Active Visual Search Interface for Medline

Weijian Xuan, Manhong Dai, Barbara Mirel, Justin Wilson, Brian Athey, Stanley J. Watson, Fan Meng*

Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychiatry, National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. mengf@umich.edu

Proc LSS Comput Syst Bioinform Conf. August, 2007. Vol. 6, p. 359-369. Full-Text PDF

*To whom correspondence should be addressed.

Searching the Medline database is almost a daily necessity for many biomedical researchers. However, available Medline search solutions are mainly designed for the quick retrieval of a small set of most relevant documents. Because of this search model, they are not suitable for the large-scale exploration of literature and the underlying biomedical conceptual relationships, which are common tasks in the age of high throughput experimental data analysis and cross-discipline research. We try to develop a new Medline exploration approach by incorporating interactive visualization together with powerful grouping, summary, sorting and active external content retrieval functions. Our solution, PubViz, is based on the FLEX platform designed for interactive web applications and its prototype is publicly available at: http://brainarray.mbni.med.umich.edu/Brainarray/DataMining/PubViz.