Semantic biomedical resource discovery: a Natural Language Processing framework.

Journal: BMC medical informatics and decision making
Published Date:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: A plethora of publicly available biomedical resources do currently exist and are constantly increasing at a fast rate. In parallel, specialized repositories are been developed, indexing numerous clinical and biomedical tools. The main drawback of such repositories is the difficulty in locating appropriate resources for a clinical or biomedical decision task, especially for non-Information Technology expert users. In parallel, although NLP research in the clinical domain has been active since the 1960s, progress in the development of NLP applications has been slow and lags behind progress in the general NLP domain. The aim of the present study is to investigate the use of semantics for biomedical resources annotation with domain specific ontologies and exploit Natural Language Processing methods in empowering the non-Information Technology expert users to efficiently search for biomedical resources using natural language.

Authors

  • Pepi Sfakianaki
    Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH), Institute of Computer Science, N. Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
  • Lefteris Koumakis
    Computational BioMedicine Laboratory, FORTH-ICS, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
  • Stelios Sfakianakis
    Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH), Institute of Computer Science, N. Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
  • Galatia Iatraki
    Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH), Institute of Computer Science, N. Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
  • Giorgos Zacharioudakis
    Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH), Institute of Computer Science, N. Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
  • Norbert Graf
    Paediatric Haematology and Oncology, Saarland University Hospital, Homburg, Germany.
  • Kostas Marias
    Computational BioMedicine Laboratory, FORTH-ICS, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
  • Manolis Tsiknakis
    Computational BioMedicine Laboratory, FORTH-ICS, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.