Evaluating Wikipedia as a source of information for disease understanding

The increasing availability of biological data is improving our understanding of diseases and providing new insight into their underlying relationships. Thanks to the improvements on both text mining techniques and computational capacity, the combination of biological data with semantic information obtained from medical publications has proven to be a very promising path. However, the limitations in the access to these data and their lack of structure pose challenges to this approach. In this document we propose the use of Wikipedia - the free online encyclopedia - as a source of accessible textual information for disease understanding research. To check its validity, we compare its performance in the determination of relationships between diseases with that of PubMed, one of the most consulted data sources of medical texts. The obtained results suggest that the information extracted from Wikipedia is as relevant as that obtained from PubMed abstracts (i.e. the free access portion of its articles), although further research is proposed to verify its reliability for medical studies.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables, published at IEEE CBMS 2018, 2018 IEEE 31st International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS

Extracting diagnostic knowledge from MedLine Plus: a comparison between MetaMap and cTAKES Approaches

The development of diagnostic decision support systems (DDSS) requires having a reliable and consistent knowledge base about diseases and their symptoms, signs and diagnostic tests. Physicians are typically the source of this knowledge, but it is not always possible to obtain all the desired information from them. Other valuable sources are medical books and articles describing the diagnosis of diseases, but again, extracting this information is a hard and time-consuming task. In this paper we present the results of our research, in which we have used Web scraping, natural language processing techniques, a variety of publicly available sources of diagnostic knowledge and two widely known medical concept identifiers, MetaMap and cTAKES, to extract diagnostic criteria for infectious diseases from MedLine Plus articles. A performance comparison of MetaMap and cTAKES is also presented