Automating Data Entry for Online Biomedical Databases

摘要

The Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, an R&D division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), is engaged in developing systems for automating the extraction of information from biomedical journals to create bibliographic records in MEDLINE~R, NLM's premier online database used worldwide. The first phase of this project has resulted in a system that involves scanning and converting (by OCR) the abstracts that appear in journal articles, while keyboarding the remaining fields. A second generation system is being designed to automate the entry of other fields such as author names, institutional affiliations, page numbers, article titles and others. This system will employ scanning and OCR as well as document image analysis techniques that will automatically zone the scanned pages, identify the zones as particular fields, and reformat the field syntax to adhere to conventional practice in MEDLINE. This paper describes the first generation system currently used for production, and the work toward the design of the second generation system.