Thinking PubMed: an innovative system for mental health domain

Information regarding mental illness is dispersed over various resources but even within a specific resource, such as PubMed, it is difficult to link this information, to share it and find specific information when needed. Specific and targeted searches are very difficult with current search engines as they look for the specific string of letters within the text rather than its meaning.In this paper we present Thinking PubMed as a system that results from synergy of ontology and data mining technologies and performs intelligent information searches using the domain ontology. Furthermore, the Thinking PubMed analyzes and links the retrieved information, and extracts hidden patterns and knowledge using data mining algorithms. This is a new generation of information-seeking tool where the ontology and data-mining work in concert to increase the value of the available information

Knowledge-based Biomedical Data Science 2019

Knowledge-based biomedical data science (KBDS) involves the design and implementation of computer systems that act as if they knew about biomedicine. Such systems depend on formally represented knowledge in computer systems, often in the form of knowledge graphs. Here we survey the progress in the last year in systems that use formally represented knowledge to address data science problems in both clinical and biological domains, as well as on approaches for creating knowledge graphs. Major themes include the relationships between knowledge graphs and machine learning, the use of natural language processing, and the expansion of knowledge-based approaches to novel domains, such as Chinese Traditional Medicine and biodiversity.Comment: Manuscript 43 pages with 3 tables; Supplemental material 43 pages with 3 table

CREATING A BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGY INDEXED SEARCH ENGINE TO IMPROVE THE SEMANTIC RELEVANCE OF RETREIVED MEDICAL TEXT

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a controlled vocabulary used by the National Library of Medicine to index medical articles, abstracts, and journals contained within the MEDLINE database. Although MeSH imposes uniformity and consistency in the indexing process, it has been proven that using MeSH indices only result in a small increase in precision over free-text indexing. Moreover, studies have shown that the use of controlled vocabularies in the indexing process is not an effective method to increase semantic relevance in information retrieval. To address the need for semantic relevance, we present an ontology-based information retrieval system for the MEDLINE collection that result in a 37.5% increase in precision when compared to free-text indexing systems. The presented system focuses on the ontology to: provide an alternative to text-representation for medical articles, finding relationships among co-occurring terms in abstracts, and to index terms that appear in text as well as discovered relationships. The presented system is then compared to existing MeSH and Free-Text information retrieval systems. This dissertation provides a proof-of-concept for an online retrieval system capable of providing increased semantic relevance when searching through medical abstracts in MEDLINE

e-MIR2: a public online inventory of medical informatics resources

Background. Over the last years, the number of available informatics resources in medicine has grown exponentially. While specific inventories of such resources have already begun to be developed for Bioinformatics (BI), comparable inventories are as yet not available for Medical Informatics (MI) field, so that locating and accessing them currently remains a hard and time-consuming task. Description. We have created a repository of MI resources from the scientific literature, providing free access to its contents through a web-based service. Relevant information describing the resources is automatically extracted from manuscripts published in top-ranked MI journals. We used a pattern matching approach to detect the resources? names and their main features. Detected resources are classified according to three different criteria: functionality, resource type and domain. To facilitate these tasks, we have built three different taxonomies by following a novel approach based on folksonomies and social tagging. We adopted the terminology most frequently used by MI researchers in their publications to create the concepts and hierarchical relationships belonging to the taxonomies. The classification algorithm identifies the categories associated to resources and annotates them accordingly. The database is then populated with this data after manual curation and validation. Conclusions. We have created an online repository of MI resources to assist researchers in locating and accessing the most suitable resources to perform specific tasks. The database contained 282 resources at the time of writing. We are continuing to expand the number of available resources by taking into account further publications as well as suggestions from users and resource developers

Construction of antimicrobial peptide-drug combination networks from scientific literature based on a semi-automated curation workflow

Considerable research efforts are being invested in the development of novel antimicrobial therapies effective against the growing number of multi-drug resistant (MDR) pathogens. Notably, the combination of different agents is increasingly explored as means to exploit and improve individual agent actions while minimising microorganism resistance. Although there are several databases on antimicrobial agents, scientific literature is the primary source of information on experimental antimicrobial combination testing. This work presents a semi-automated database curation workflow that supports the mining of scientific literature and enables the reconstruction of recently documented antimicrobial combinations. Currently, the database contains data on antimicrobial combinations that have been experimentally tested against Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Listeria monocytogenes and Candida albicans, which are prominent pathogenic organisms and are well-known for their wide and growing resistance to conventional antimicrobials. Researchers are able to explore the experimental results for a single organism or across organisms. Likewise, researchers may look into indirect network associations and identify new potential combinations to be tested. The database is available without charges. Database URL: http://sing.ei.uvigo.es/antimicrobialCombination/This study was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the scope of the strategic funding of UID/BIO/04469/2013 unit and COMPETE 2020 (POCI-01-0145FEDER-006684), and support by FCT and the European Community fund FEDER, through the Programme COMPETE, under the scope of the Projects AntiPep PTDC/SAU-SAP/113196/2009 (FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-016012) and RECI/BBB-EBI/0179/2012 (FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-027462). Authors acknowledge the PhD Grant of Paula Jorge, funded by FCT Ref. SFRH/BD/ 88192/2012, and the PhD grants of Martin Pérez-Pérez and Gael Pe´rez-Rodriguez, funded by the University of Vigo. Finally, this study was partially funded by the [15VI013] Contract-Programme from the University of Vigo and the Agrupamento INBIOMED from DXPCTSUG-FEDER unha maneira de facer Europa (2012/273). This document reflects only the authors views and the European Union is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained herein

Towards a Protein-Protein Interaction information extraction system: recognizing named entities

[EN] The majority of biological functions of any living being are related to Protein Protein Interactions (PPI). PPI discoveries are reported in form of research publications whose volume grows day after day. Consequently, automatic PPI information extraction systems are a pressing need for biologists. In this paper we are mainly concerned with the named entity detection module of PPIES (the PPI information extraction system we are implementing) which recognizes twelve entity types relevant in PPI context. It is composed of two sub-modules: a dictionary look-up with extensive normalization and acronym detection, and a Conditional Random Field classifier. The dictionary look-up module has been tested with Interaction Method Task (IMT), and it improves by approximately 10% the current solutions that do not use Machine Learning (ML). The second module has been used to create a classifier using the Joint Workshop on Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine and its Applications (JNLPBA 04) data set. It does not use any external resources, or complex or ad hoc post-processing, and obtains 77.25%, 75.04% and 76.13 for precision, recall, and F1-measure, respectively, improving all previous results obtained for this data set.This work has been funded by MICINN, Spain, as part of the "Juan de la Cierva" Program and the Project DIANA-Applications (TIN2012-38603-C02-01), as well as the by the European Commission as part of the WIQ-EI IRSES Project (Grant No. 269180) within the FP 7 Marie Curie People Framework.Danger Mercaderes, RM.; Pla Santamaría, F.; Molina Marco, A.; Rosso, P. (2014). Towards a Protein-Protein Interaction information extraction system: recognizing named entities. Knowledge-Based Systems. 57:104-118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2013.12.010S1041185