ARRS GoldMiner

RRS GoldMiner (http://GoldMiner.arrs.org/) is another radiology-centric search engine whose niche is providing the radiologist with direct access to images selected only from peer-reviewed journals. GoldMiner was created by Charles E. Kahn, Jr, MD, of the Medical College of Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Wis) and is offered as a free service of the American Roentgen Ray Society (4). Its collection was recently markedly expanded to more than 170 000 images and over 225 journals by partnering with BioMed Central, a free database of peer-reviewed scientific articles. Like Yottalook, GoldMiner performs a concept-based search that expands the user's search query beyond simple word-matching. The GoldMiner service can be useful in assembling a presentation or in scanning for look-alike images when struggling with a problem case. The Web site features a clean design, with each row of the display containing a thumbnail image, as well as the source article's title and journal link (Fig 4), though it would be helpful to be able to view more images per page, as in the Yottalook thumbnails-only view. A click on the thumbnail image directs you to the full-resolution image on the journal's Web site and the full text of the article it came from. A PowerPoint (Microsoft, Redmond, Wash) slide containing both the image and appropriate reference notation can often be downloaded through these links. This online access is possible because the journals typically make their content fully available on the Web within 12–24 months after publication. One can filter the results by modality, patient age, and patient sex from a set of pull-down tabs that also indicate how many image results are available in each category.
A newer offering from the same site is GoldMiner Global. Alhough still in a developmental (beta) status, this multilingual interface enables users to submit search terms in any of 10 languages to the GoldMiner image database