Dataset Information

Medical Concept Normalization in Clinical Trials with Drug and Disease Representation Learning.

ABSTRACT:

Motivation

Clinical trials are the essential stage of every drug development program for the treatment to become available to patients. Despite the importance of well-structured clinical trial databases and their tremendous value for drug discovery and development such instances are very rare. Presently large-scale information on clinical trials is stored in clinical trial registers which are relatively structured, but the mappings to external databases of drugs and diseases are increasingly lacking. The precise production of such links would enable us to interrogate richer harmonized datasets for invaluable insights.

Results

We present a neural approach for medical concept normalization of diseases and drugs. Our two-stage approach is based on Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). In the training stage, we optimize the relative similarity of mentions and concept names from a terminology via triplet loss. In the inference stage, we obtain the closest concept name representation in a common embedding space to a given mention representation. We performed a set of experiments on a dataset of abstracts and a real-world dataset of trial records with interventions and conditions mapped to drug and disease terminologies. The latter includes mentions associated with one or more concepts (in-KB) or zero (out-of-KB, nil prediction). Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms baseline and state-of-the-art architectures. Moreover, we demonstrate that our approach is effective in knowledge transfer from the scientific literature to clinical trial data.

Availability

We make code and data freely available at hidden\_during\_review\_process.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

SUBMITTER: Miftahutdinov Z

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8570806 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Information encoded in natural language in biomedical literature publications is only useful if efficient and reliable ways of accessing and analyzing that information are available. Natural language processing and text mining tools are therefore essential for extracting valuable information, however, the development of powerful, highly effective tools to automatically detect central biomedical concepts such as diseases is conditional on the availability of annotated corpora. This paper presents the disease name and concept annotations of the NCBI disease corpus, a collection of 793 PubMed abstracts fully annotated at the mention and concept level to serve as a research resource for the biomedical natural language processing community. Each PubMed abstract was manually annotated by two annotators with disease mentions and their corresponding concepts in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) or Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM®). Manual curation was performed using PubTator, which allowed the use of pre-annotations as a pre-step to manual annotations. Fourteen annotators were randomly paired and differing annotations were discussed for reaching a consensus in two annotation phases. In this setting, a high inter-annotator agreement was observed. Finally, all results were checked against annotations of the rest of the corpus to assure corpus-wide consistency. The public release of the NCBI disease corpus contains 6892 disease mentions, which are mapped to 790 unique disease concepts. Of these, 88% link to a MeSH identifier, while the rest contain an OMIM identifier. We were able to link 91% of the mentions to a single disease concept, while the rest are described as a combination of concepts. In order to help researchers use the corpus to design and test disease identification methods, we have prepared the corpus as training, testing and development sets. To demonstrate its utility, we conducted a benchmarking experiment where we compared three different knowledge-based disease normalization methods with a best performance in F-measure of 63.7%. These results show that the NCBI disease corpus has the potential to significantly improve the state-of-the-art in disease name recognition and normalization research, by providing a high-quality gold standard thus enabling the development of machine-learning based approaches for such tasks. The NCBI disease corpus, guidelines and other associated resources are available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CBBresearch/Dogan/DISEASE/.