Multilingual retrieval of radiology images.

The multilingual search engine ARRS GoldMiner Global was created to facilitate broad international access to a richly indexed collection of more than 200,000 radiologic images. Images are indexed according to key-words and medical concepts that appear in the unstructured text of their English-language image captions. GoldMiner Global exploits the Unicode standard, which allows the accurate representation of characters and ideographs from virtually any language and which supports both left-to-right and right-to-left text directions. The user interface supports queries in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish. GoldMiner Global incorporates an interface to the United States National Library of Medicine that translates queries into English-language Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms. The translated MeSH terms are then used to search the image index and retrieve relevant images. Explanatory text, pull-down menu choices, and navigational guides are displayed in the selected language; search results are displayed in English. GoldMiner Global is freely available on the World Wide Web.