Gene symbol recognition with GeneOCR

Abstract

MotivationFigures in biomedical publications often contain lists of gene symbols. Human intelligence and manual curation is required to recognize, extract, and validate the symbols in order to reuse them. The task is laborious, error prone, and amenable to automation. ResultsWe introduce GeneOCR, a web-based software to recognize, extract, and check gene symbols from figures. It features both an interactive user interface and programmatic access. Simulation-based benchmark reveals that GeneOCR recognizes or suggests correct gene symbols in more than 80% cases. The performance qualifies GeneOCR as an enhancement to manual curation. AvailabilityThe source code of GeneOCR is available with GNU v3 license at https://github.com/bedapub/GeneOCR-UI (frontend) and https://github.com/bedapub/GeneOCR-API (backend). A Docker/Singularity image is available via BioContainers. Contactjitao_david.zhang@roche.com