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

A place for SSRIs in the treatment of severely depressed children and adolescents

Item does not contain fulltextAlthough in the past there were objections against the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) for the treatment of depression in children and adolescents, recent studies have shown that SSRIs, in particular fluoxetine, are effective against depression in this age group. Cognitive behavioural therapy has a questionable effect in children and adolescents with severe depression. Other unequivocally effective treatment options are not available. More suicidal behaviour was reported in children and adolescents using sertraline or venlafaxine, but fluoxetine did not clearly enhance this behaviour. Children with severe depression or a depression not responding to psychological therapy can be treated with SSRIs. Fluoxetine is the treatment of first choice

Active surveillance for low-risk prostate cancer

Active surveillance (AS) is an important management strategy for men diagnosed with low-risk prostate cancer (PCa). The need for AS is increasing due to the awareness that many PCa are identified that show a low growth potential and therefore are likely to remain clinically asymptomatic during the lifetime of an individual. Currently there is no good method to prevent the overdiagnosis of indolent cancers upfront. During the last decade, several studies on AS around the world have made observations that feed the discussion on how to select and monitor these patients, how to proceed with the research to develop a better and more precise clinical definition of indolent cancers and how to manage men under AS clinically. Furthermore, patients' perspectives have become clearer, and quality of life studies give direction to the practical approach and care for patients and partners. This paper reflects the consensus on the state of the art and the future direction of AS, based on the Inside Track Conference " Active Surveillance for low risk prostate cancer" (Chairmen: C.H. Bangma, NL, and L. Klotz, CA; Co-Chairmen: L.J. Denis, BE, and C. Parker, UK; Scientific Coordinators: M. J. Roobol, NL, and E.W. Steyerberg, NL), organized by the European School of Oncology in collaboration with Europa Uomo in Rotterdam, the Netherlands in January 2012. Topics for discussion were the optimisation of patient selection based on indolent disease definition, the incorporation of therapeutic agents into AS programs, the optimisation of patient care, and the application of emerging technologies and biomarkers