Substituting clinical features using synthetic medical phrases: Medical text data augmentation techniques.

Biomedical natural language processing (NLP) has an important role in extracting consequential information in medical discharge notes. Detecting meaningful features from unstructured notes is a challenging task in medical document classification. The domain specific phrases and different synonyms within the medical documents make it hard to analyze them. Analyzing clinical notes becomes more challenging for short documents like abstract texts. All of these can result in poor classification performance, especially when there is a shortage of the clinical data in real life. Two new approaches (an ontology-guided approach and a combined ontology-based with dictionary-based approach) are suggested for augmenting medical data to enrich training data. Three different deep learning approaches are used to evaluate the classification performance of the proposed methods. The obtained results show that the proposed methods improved the classification accuracy in clinical notes classification

Lead (II) Tolerance and Uptake Capacities of Fungi Isolated from a Polluted Tributary in the Philippines

The Lead [Pb(II)] tolerance and uptake ability of four fungal species, two from the genus Penicillium and two from the genus Talaromyces were investigated in this study. The species were isolated from a polluted tributary and identified to be closest to P. canescens, P. simplicissimum, T. macrosporus and another Talaromyces sp. via PCR targeting their internal transcribed spacer 1 and 4 sequences. All isolates have tolerances for up to 2000 µg/mL and 3000 µg/mL Pb(II) on solid and liquid medium, respectively. Both Penicillium isolates showed increasing removal rates dependent on initial Pb(II) concentration at 500 to 2000 µg/mL, while removal rates of both Talaromyces isolates were not significantly influenced by initial Pb(II) concentrations. The Pb(II) uptake of all isolates increased with increasing Pb(II) concentration but was depressed at 3000 µg/mL, with the exception of T. macrosporus. The recorded total uptake capacities for both Penicillium isolates in this study were higher than in most literature, at 7.0 – 407.4 mg/g and 50.8 – 412.6 mg/g for P. canescens and P. simplicissimum, respectively. The study also reported the exemplary Pb(II) uptake capacities of both Talaromyces isolates at 58.9 – 601.0 mg/g and 60.9 – 402.3 mg/g for T. macrosporus and Talaromyces sp., respectively. These results signify the excellent Pb(II) removal capabilities of all isolates which may further be developed for use as mycoremediation tools to remove Pb(II) from heavy metal contaminated environments