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

Sol-gel Synthesis of Titanium/Bismuth Oxide Coatings for Biocompatibility Applications on 316L Stainless Steel

Objectives: This study was carried out in order to establish the potential offered by the sol-gel method to obtain Titanium/ Bismuth oxide coatings on 316L Stainless Steel (SS) substrates in biocompatibility applications. Methods/Analysis: The stable sol was synthesized by using Bismuth nitrate (III) pentahydrate and Titanium (IV) butoxide. The coatings were deposited by spin-coating technique at 4000 rpm and characterized topographically by Scanning Electron Microscopy SEM and structurally by X-ray diffraction XRD. Through the techniques of polarization potentiodynamic curves and Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS), the anticorrosive response of the �ilms was evaluated. The thickness was then measured, and biocompatibility test was developed. Findings: It was found that the coatings with high composition of the precursor titanium (IV) butoxide offer the best results as an anticorrosive application. Likewise, the growth of cells was uniform on the �ilms indicating that the medium offered by the �ilms does not present active cytotoxicity and surpasses by a large number the cellular growth level compared to stainless steel. Applications /Improvement: 316L (SS) is very useful in implantology, for its low cost compared with other materials. The implanted steel suffers corrosion by the physiological �luids of body. Titanium/Bismuth coatings establish a barrier between body �luids and SS implant