Figure classification in biomedical literature to elucidate disease mechanisms, based on pathways.

Objective: As more full-text biomedical papers are becoming available in digitized form online, there is a need for tools to mine information from all parts of such papers. Because the figures and legends/captions in biomedical papers provide important information about research outcomes, mining techniques targeting them have attracted a great deal of attention. In this study, we focused on pathway figures that illustrate signaling or metabolic pathways, because many of these are important in understanding disease mechanism(s).