Evidence map›Paper›PMID 24949194›Full record

ArticleJournal of biomedical semantics2014

Mining characteristics of epidemiological studies from Medline: a case study in obesity.

George Karystianis, Iain Buchan, Goran Nenadic

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of biomedical semantics, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
11citing papers in PubMed, 1 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.

  1. Pooled it
  2. Article
  3. Article
  4. Review
  5. Article
  6. Article
  7. A Scoping Review of Adopted Information Extraction Methods for RCTs.Medical journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran · 2023
    Article
  8. A Narrative Literature Review of Natural Language Processing Applied to the Occupational Exposome.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022
    Review
  9. Improving reference prioritisation with PICO recognition.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2019
    Article
  10. Interpretable Topic Features for Post-ICU Mortality Prediction.AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium · 2016
    Article
  11. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

George KarystianisSchool of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester, UK ; Health e-Research Centre, Manchester, UK.
Iain BuchanHealth e-Research Centre, Manchester, UK ; Centre for Health Informatics, Institute of Population Health, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
Goran NenadicSchool of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester, UK ; Health e-Research Centre, Manchester, UK.

Funding

Medical Research Council MC_PC_13042Medical Research Council MR/K006665/1
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

backgroundThe health sciences literature incorporates a relatively large subset of epidemiological studies that focus on population-level findings, including various determinants, outcomes and correlations. Extracting structured information about those characteristics would be useful for more complete understanding of diseases and for meta-analyses and systematic reviews.

resultsWe present an information extraction approach that enables users to identify key characteristics of epidemiological studies from MEDLINE abstracts. It extracts six types of epidemiological characteristic: design of the study, population that has been studied, exposure, outcome, covariates and effect size. We have developed a generic rule-based approach that has been designed according to semantic patterns observed in text, and tested it in the domain of obesity. Identified exposure, outcome and covariate concepts are clustered into health-related groups of interest. On a manually annotated test corpus of 60 epidemiological abstracts, the system achieved precision, recall and F-score between 79-100%, 80-100% and 82-96% respectively. We report the results of applying the method to a large scale epidemiological corpus related to obesity.

conclusionsThe experiments suggest that the proposed approach could identify key epidemiological characteristics associated with a complex clinical problem from related abstracts. When integrated over the literature, the extracted data can be used to provide a more complete picture of epidemiological efforts, and thus support understanding via meta-analysis and systematic reviews.

Indexed as

EpidemiologyKey characteristicsRule-based methodologyText mining

Identifiers

PMID24949194
PMCPMC4062908

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.