Should We Collaborate with AI to Conduct Literature Reviews? Changing Epistemic Values in a Flattening World

In this paper, we revisit the issue of collaboration with artificial intelligence (AI) to conduct literature reviews and discuss if this should be done and how it could be done. We also call for further reflection on the epistemic values at risk when using certain types of AI tools based on machine learning or generative AI at different stages of the review process, which often require the scope to be redefined and fundamentally follow an iterative process. Although AI tools accelerate search and screening tasks, particularly when there are vast amounts of literature involved, they may compromise quality, especially when it comes to transparency and explainability. Expert systems are less likely to have a negative impact on these tasks. In a broader context, any AI method should preserve researchers’ ability to critically select, analyze, and interpret the literature

A framework for trend mining with application to medical data

This thesis presents research work conducted in the field of knowledge discovery. It presents an integrated trend-mining framework and SOMA, which is the application of the trend-mining framework in diabetic retinopathy data. Trend mining is the process of identifying and analysing trends in the context of the variation of support of the association/classification rules that have been extracted from longitudinal datasets. The integrated framework concerns all major processes from data preparation to the extraction of knowledge. At the pre-process stage, data are cleaned, transformed if necessary, and sorted into time-stamped datasets using logic rules. At the next stage, time-stamp datasets are passed through the main processing, in which the ARM technique of matrix algorithm is applied to identify frequent rules with acceptable confidence. Mathematical conditions are applied to classify the sequences of support values into trends. Afterwards, interestingness criteria are applied to obtain interesting knowledge, and a visualization technique is proposed that maps how objects are moving from the previous to the next time stamp. A validation and verification (external and internal validation) framework is described that aims to ensure that the results at the intermediate stages of the framework are correct and that the framework as a whole can yield results that demonstrate causality. To evaluate the thesis, SOMA was developed. The dataset is, in itself, also of interest, as it is very noisy (in common with other similar medical datasets) and does not feature a clear association between specific time stamps and subsets of the data. The Royal Liverpool University Hospital has been a major centre for retinopathy research since 1991. Retinopathy is a generic term used to describe damage to the retina of the eye, which can, in the long term, lead to visual loss. Diabetic retinopathy is used to evaluate the framework, to determine whether SOMA can extract knowledge that is already known to the medics. The results show that those datasets can be used to extract knowledge that can show causality between patients’ characteristics such as the age of patient at diagnosis, type of diabetes, duration of diabetes, and diabetic retinopathy

Exploiting semantics for improving clinical information retrieval

Clinical information retrieval (IR) presents several challenges including terminology mismatch and granularity mismatch. One of the main objectives in clinical IR is to fill the semantic gap among the queries and documents and going beyond keywords matching. To address these issues, in this study we attempt to use semantic information to improve the performance of clinical IR systems by representing queries in an expressive and meaningful context. In this study we propose query context modeling to improve the effectiveness of clinical IR systems. To model query contexts we propose two novel approaches to modeling medical query contexts. The first approach concerns modeling medical query contexts based on mining semantic-based AR for improving clinical text retrieval. The query context is derived from the rules that cover the query and then weighted according to their semantic relatedness to the query concepts. In our second approach we model a representative query context by developing query domain ontology. To develop query domain ontology we extract all the concepts that have semantic relationship with the query concept(s) in UMLS ontologies. Query context represents concepts extracted from query domain ontology and weighted according to their semantic relatedness to the query concept(s). The query context is then exploited in the patient records query expansion and re-ranking for improving clinical retrieval performance. We evaluate this approach on the TREC Medical Records dataset. Results show that our proposed approach significantly improves the retrieval performance compare to classic keyword-based IR model