Evidence map›Paper›PMID 29196280›Full record

ArticleJMIR medical informatics2017

Search and Graph Database Technologies for Biomedical Semantic Indexing: Experimental Analysis.

Isabel Segura Bedmar, Paloma Martínez, Adrián Carruana Martín

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in JMIR medical informatics, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
2citing 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

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

  1. Pooled it
  2. 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.

Isabel Segura BedmarLaBDA Group, Department of Computer Science, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés, Spain.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7810-2360
Paloma MartínezLaBDA Group, Department of Computer Science, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés, Spain.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3013-3771
Adrián Carruana MartínLaBDA Group, Department of Computer Science, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés, Spain.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1517-5423

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

backgroundBiomedical semantic indexing is a very useful support tool for human curators in their efforts for indexing and cataloging the biomedical literature.

objectiveThe aim of this study was to describe a system to automatically assign Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to biomedical articles from MEDLINE.

methodsOur approach relies on the assumption that similar documents should be classified by similar MeSH terms. Although previous work has already exploited the document similarity by using a k-nearest neighbors algorithm, we represent documents as document vectors by search engine indexing and then compute the similarity between documents using cosine similarity. Once the most similar documents for a given input document are retrieved, we rank their MeSH terms to choose the most suitable set for the input document. To do this, we define a scoring function that takes into account the frequency of the term into the set of retrieved documents and the similarity between the input document and each retrieved document. In addition, we implement guidelines proposed by human curators to annotate MEDLINE articles; in particular, the heuristic that says if 3 MeSH terms are proposed to classify an article and they share the same ancestor, they should be replaced by this ancestor. The representation of the MeSH thesaurus as a graph database allows us to employ graph search algorithms to quickly and easily capture hierarchical relationships such as the lowest common ancestor between terms.

resultsOur experiments show promising results with an F1 of 69% on the test dataset.

conclusionsTo the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that combines search and graph database technologies for the task of biomedical semantic indexing. Due to its horizontal scalability, ElasticSearch becomes a real solution to index large collections of documents (such as the bibliographic database MEDLINE). Moreover, the use of graph search algorithms for accessing MeSH information could provide a support tool for cataloging MEDLINE abstracts in real time.

Indexed as

information storage and retrievalMedical Subject Headingssemantic indexing

Identifiers

PMID29196280
PMCPMC5732329

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LicenceCC BY
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Registered trials

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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.