The Communications Engineering Branch is engaged in applied research and development in image engineering and communications engineering motivated by mission-critical tasks such as document delivery, preservation of electronic resources, automated production of MEDLINE records, Internet access to biomedical multimedia databases, reliable information delivery to handheld computers in a clinical setting, and imaging tools in support of medical research employing digitized radiographic, anatomic, cervicographic, and other imagery. In addition to applied research, the Branch also developed and maintains operational systems for production of bibliographic records for the NLM flagship database, MEDLINE.

Research areas include:

• the design of multimedia-rich interactive publications
• content-based image indexing and retrieval (CBIR) of biomedical images
• document image analysis and understanding (DIAU)
• image compression
• image enhancement
• image feature identification and extraction
• image segmentation
• image retrieval by query by image content
• image transmission
• optical character recognition (OCR)
• man-machine interface design applied to automated data entry

CEB also maintains archives of large numbers of digitized spine x-rays, uterine cervix images, and bit-mapped document images that are used for intramural and outside research purposes. Information on these projects appears at http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/