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MedlineRanker: flexible ranking of biomedical literature.

ABSTRACT: The biomedical literature is represented by millions of abstracts available in the Medline database. These abstracts can be queried with the PubMed interface, which provides a keyword-based Boolean search engine. This approach shows limitations in the retrieval of abstracts related to very specific topics, as it is difficult for a non-expert user to find all of the most relevant keywords related to a biomedical topic. Additionally, when searching for more general topics, the same approach may return hundreds of unranked references. To address these issues, text mining tools have been developed to help scientists focus on relevant abstracts. We have implemented the MedlineRanker webserver, which allows a flexible ranking of Medline for a topic of interest without expert knowledge. Given some abstracts related to a topic, the program deduces automatically the most discriminative words in comparison to a random selection. These words are used to score other abstracts, including those from not yet annotated recent publications, which can be then ranked by relevance. We show that our tool can be highly accurate and that it is able to process millions of abstracts in a practical amount of time. MedlineRanker is free for use and is available at http://cbdm.mdc-berlin.de/tools/medlineranker.

SUBMITTER: Fontaine JF

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2703945 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundFor selection and evaluation of potential biomarkers, inclusion of already published information is of utmost importance. In spite of significant advancements in text- and data-mining techniques, the vast knowledge space of biomarkers in biomedical text has remained unexplored. Existing named entity recognition approaches are not sufficiently selective for the retrieval of biomarker information from the literature. The purpose of this study was to identify textual features that enhance the effectiveness of biomarker information retrieval for different indication areas and diverse end user perspectives.MethodsA biomarker terminology was created and further organized into six concept classes. Performance of this terminology was optimized towards balanced selectivity and specificity. The information retrieval performance using the biomarker terminology was evaluated based on various combinations of the terminology's six classes. Further validation of these results was performed on two independent corpora representing two different neurodegenerative diseases.ResultsThe current state of the biomarker terminology contains 119 entity classes supported by 1890 different synonyms. The result of information retrieval shows improved retrieval rate of informative abstracts, which is achieved by including clinical management terms and evidence of gene/protein alterations (e.g. gene/protein expression status or certain polymorphisms) in combination with disease and gene name recognition. When additional filtering through other classes (e.g. diagnostic or prognostic methods) is applied, the typical high number of unspecific search results is significantly reduced. The evaluation results suggest that this approach enables the automated identification of biomarker information in the literature. A demo version of the search engine SCAIView, including the biomarker retrieval, is made available to the public through http://www.scaiview.com/scaiview-academia.html.ConclusionsThe approach presented in this paper demonstrates that using a dedicated biomarker terminology for automated analysis of the scientific literature maybe helpful as an aid to finding biomarker information in text. Successful extraction of candidate biomarkers information from published resources can be considered as the first step towards developing novel hypotheses. These hypotheses will be valuable for the early decision-making in the drug discovery and development process.

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MedlineRanker: flexible ranking of biomedical literature.

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