Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Keratoconus patients at Jordan University Hospital: a descriptive study

Mohammed A Abu Ameerh, Rola M Al Refai, Muawya D Al BdourOphthalmology Department, Jordan University Hospital, Amman, JordanPurpose: To study a sample of keratoconus patients, who were referred to Jordan University Hospital for possible penetrating keratoplasty (PKP), and provide basic epidemiological analysis.Method: A descriptive study; we reviewed the medical records of 308 keratoconus patients referred for possible PKP. The following parameters were collected and analyzed: sex predilection, age at presentation, best corrected visual acuity, severity, bilaterality of the disease, and its association with vernal catarrh.Results: Males constituted 61.6% while females constituted 38.4% of the study group. The mean age at presentation for males and females was 19.1 and 19.9 years, respectively. The best corrected visual acuity on evaluation was ≤6/60 in 60.4% of males’ eyes and 57.9% of females’ eyes; >6/60 and <6/12 in 30% of males’ eyes and 28.5% of females’ eyes; and ≥6/12 in 9.6% of males’ eyes and 13.6% of females’ eyes. Regarding the severity, 72.3% of males’ eyes and 71.8% of females’ eyes had severe keratoconus; 17.3% of males’ and 28.2% of females’ eyes had moderate keratoconus; and 10.4% of males’ eyes had mild keratoconus, which was not recorded in females. 90.5% of male patients and 93.2% of female patients had bilateral disease and vernal catarrh was recorded in 33.7% of males and 35.6% of females.Conclusion: Keratoconus was found to be more prevalent in Jordanian males referred for PKP than females, keeping in mind that this doesn’t reflect the real sex predilection in the general population. Males also presented at a younger age. We didn’t find any association between gender and bilaterality, nor association with vernal catarrh.Keywords: Jordan, keratoconus, penetrating keratoplasty, vernal keratoconjunctiviti