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Research in biomedical text mining is starting to produce technology which can make information in biomedical literature more accessible for bio-scientists. One of the current challenges is to integrate and refine this technology to support real-life scientific tasks in biomedicine, and to evaluate its usefulness in the context of such tasks. We describe CRAB - a fully integrated text mining tool designed to support chemical health risk assessment. This task is complex and time-consuming, requiring a thorough review of existing scientific data on a particular chemical. Covering human, animal, cellular and other mechanistic data from various fields of biomedicine, this is highly varied and therefore difficult to harvest from literature databases via manual means. Our tool automates the process by extracting relevant scientific data in published literature and classifying it according to multiple qualitative dimensions. Developed in close collaboration with risk assessors, the tool allows navigating the classified dataset in various ways and sharing the data with other users. We present a direct and user-based evaluation which shows that the technology integrated in the tool is highly accurate, and report a number of case studies which demonstrate how the tool can be used to support scientific discovery in cancer risk assessment and research. Our work demonstrates the usefulness of a text mining pipeline in facilitating complex research tasks in biomedicine. We discuss further development and application of our technology to other types of chemical risk assessment in the future.
Pubmed ID: 22511921
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View all literature mentionsA controlled vocabulary thesaurus that consists of sets of terms naming descriptors in a hierarchical structure that permits searching at various levels of specificity. MeSH, in machine-readable form, is provided at no charge via electronic means. MeSH descriptors are arranged in both an alphabetic and a hierarchical structure. At the most general level of the hierarchical structure are very broad headings such as Anatomy or Mental Disorders. More specific headings are found at more narrow levels of the twelve-level hierarchy, such as Ankle and Conduct Disorder. There are 27,149 descriptors in 2014 MeSH. There are also over 218,000 entry terms that assist in finding the most appropriate MeSH Heading, for example, Vitamin C is an entry term to Ascorbic Acid. In addition to these headings, there are more than 219,000 headings called Supplementary Concept Records (formerly Supplementary Chemical Records) within a separate thesaurus. The MeSH thesaurus is used by NLM for indexing articles from 5,400 of the world''''s leading biomedical journals for the MEDLINE/PubMED database. It is also used for the NLM-produced database that includes cataloging of books, documents, and audiovisuals acquired by the Library. Each bibliographic reference is associated with a set of MeSH terms that describe the content of the item. Similarly, search queries use MeSH vocabulary to find items on a desired topic.
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