Mining the Medical and Patent Literature to Support Healthcare and Pharmacovigilance

Recent advancements in healthcare practices and the increasing use of information technology in the medical domain has lead to the rapid generation of free-text data in forms of scientific articles, e-health records, patents, and document inventories. This has urged the development of sophisticated information retrieval and information extraction technologies. A fundamental requirement for the automatic processing of biomedical text is the identification of information carrying units such as the concepts or named entities. In this context, this work focuses on the identification of medical disorders (such as diseases and adverse effects) which denote an important category of concepts in the medical text. Two methodologies were investigated in this regard and they are dictionary-based and machine learning-based approaches. Futhermore, the capabilities of the concept recognition techniques were systematically exploited to build a semantic search platform for the retrieval of e-health records and patents. The system facilitates conventional text search as well as semantic and ontological searches. Performance of the adapted retrieval platform for e-health records and patents was evaluated within open assessment challenges (i.e. TRECMED and TRECCHEM respectively) wherein the system was best rated in comparison to several other competing information retrieval platforms. Finally, from the medico-pharma perspective, a strategy for the identification of adverse drug events from medical case reports was developed. Qualitative evaluation as well as an expert validation of the developed system's performance showed robust results. In conclusion, this thesis presents approaches for efficient information retrieval and information extraction from various biomedical literature sources in the support of healthcare and pharmacovigilance. The applied strategies have potential to enhance the literature-searches performed by biomedical, healthcare, and patent professionals. The applied strategies have potential to enhance the literature-searches performed by biomedical, healthcare, and patent professionals. This can promote the literature-based knowledge discovery, improve the safety and effectiveness of medical practices, and drive the research and development in medical and healthcare arena

Patent Retrieval in Chemistry based on semantically tagged Named Entities

Gurulingappa H, Müller B, Klinger R, et al. Patent Retrieval in Chemistry based on semantically tagged Named Entities. In: Voorhees EM, Buckland LP, eds. The Eighteenth Text RETrieval Conference (TREC 2009) Proceedings. Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA; 2009.This paper reports on the work that has been conducted by Fraunhofer SCAI for Trec Chemistry (Trec-Chem) track 2009. The team of Fraunhofer SCAI participated in two tasks, namely Technology Survey and Prior Art Search. The core of the framework is an index of 1.2 million chemical patents provided as a data set by Trec. For the technology survey, three runs were submitted based on semantic dictionaries and noun phrases. For the prior art search task, several elds were introduced into the index that contained normalized noun phrases, biomedical as well as chemical entities. Altogether, 36 runs were submitted for this task that were based on automatic querying with tokens, noun phrases and entities along with dierent search strategies

'HypothesisFinder:' a strategy for the detection of speculative statements in scientific text.

Speculative statements communicating experimental findings are frequently found in scientific articles, and their purpose is to provide an impetus for further investigations into the given topic. Automated recognition of speculative statements in scientific text has gained interest in recent years as systematic analysis of such statements could transform speculative thoughts into testable hypotheses. We describe here a pattern matching approach for the detection of speculative statements in scientific text that uses a dictionary of speculative patterns to classify sentences as hypothetical. To demonstrate the practical utility of our approach, we applied it to the domain of Alzheimer's disease and showed that our automated approach captures a wide spectrum of scientific speculations on Alzheimer's disease. Subsequent exploration of derived hypothetical knowledge leads to generation of a coherent overview on emerging knowledge niches, and can thus provide added value to ongoing research activities

An Empirical Evaluation of Resources for the Identification of Diseases and Adverse Effects in Biomedical Literature

Gurulingappa H, Klinger R, Hofmann-Apitius M, Fluck J. An Empirical Evaluation of Resources for the Identification of Diseases and Adverse Effects in Biomedical Literature. In: 2nd Workshop on Building and evaluating resources for biomedical text mining (7th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference). 2010.The mentions of human health perturbations such as the diseases and adverse effects denote a special entity class in the biomedical literature. They help in understanding the underlying risk factors and develop a preventive rationale. The recognition of these named entities in texts through dictionary-based approaches relies on the availability of appropriate terminological resources. Although few resources are publicly available, not all are suitable for the text mining needs. Therefore, this work provides an overview of the well known resources with respect to human diseases and adverse effects such as the MeSH, MedDRA, ICD-10, SNOMED CT, and UMLS. Individual dictionaries are generated from these resources and their performance in recognizing the named entities is evaluated over a manually annotated corpus. In addition, the steps for curating the dictionaries, rule-based acronym disambiguation and their impact on the dictionary performance is discussed. The results show that the MedDRA and UMLS achieve the best recall. Besides this, MedDRA provides an additional benefit of achieving a higher precision. The combination of search results of all the dictionaries achieve a considerably high recall. The corpus is available on http://www.scai.fraunhofer.de/disease-ae-corpus.htm

Table_1_Artificial intelligence-driven approach for patient-focused drug development.pdf

Patients' increasing digital participation provides an opportunity to pursue patient-centric research and drug development by understanding their needs. Social media has proven to be one of the most useful data sources when it comes to understanding a company's potential audience to drive more targeted impact. Navigating through an ocean of information is a tedious task where techniques such as artificial intelligence and text analytics have proven effective in identifying relevant posts for healthcare business questions. Here, we present an enterprise-ready, scalable solution demonstrating the feasibility and utility of social media-based patient experience data for use in research and development through capturing and assessing patient experiences and expectations on disease, treatment options, and unmet needs while creating a playbook for roll-out to other indications and therapeutic areas.</p

An overview of HypothesisFinder development approach.

<p>The workflow for the development of HypothesisFinder shows how the model was trained, optimized and on what data sets its performance was evaluated.</p

Performance of HypothesisFinder on the HYPO–TEST corpora.

<p>MaxEnt indicates Maximum Entropy classifier. Applied features sets were baseline features (<i>base</i>), speculative features (<i>spec</i>), lexico-syntactic features (<i>lex</i>), and their combinations.</p

Comparison of information densities: HypothesisFinder vs.

<p><b>AlzSWAN.</b> A- The statistical comparison between the numbers of hypotheses related to AD captured by HypothesisFinder within SCAIView (s<i>tage-specific retrieval</i>) and the hypotheses with extended annotation derived from citations mentioned in the AlzSWAN database. B- A comparison between biological entity retrieval using SCAIView and relevant entries in AlzSWAN.</p