MedMiner: An Internet text-mining tool for biomedical information, with application to gene expression profiling

The trend toward high-throughput techniques in molecular biology and the explosion of online scientific data threaten to overwhelm the ability of researchers to take full advantage of available information. This problem is particularly severe in the rapidly expanding al ea of gene expression experiments, Sol example, those carried our with cDNA microarrays or oligonucleotide chips. We present an Internet-based hypertext program, MedMiner; which filters and organizes large amounts of textual and structured information returned from public search engines like GeneCards and PubMed We demonstrate the value of the approach for the analysts of gene expression data, but MedMiner can also be extended to other areas involving molecular genetic or pharmacological information. More generally still, MedMiner can be used to organize the information returned from any arbitrary PubMed search.