Biomedical subjects

Heinz-Theodor Mevissen

Publications and source records attributed to Heinz-Theodor Mevissen.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

The Autoimmune Disease Database: a dynamically compiled literature-derived database.

BACKGROUND: Autoimmune diseases are disorders caused by an immune response directed against the body's own organs, tissues and cells. In practice more than 80 clinically distinct diseases, among them systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis, are classified as autoimmune diseases. Although their etiology is unclear these diseases share certain similarities at the molecular level i.e. susceptibility regions on the chromosomes or the involvement of common genes. To gain an overview of these related diseases it is not feasible to do a literary review but it requires methods of automated analyses of the more than 500,000 Medline documents related to autoimmune disorders. RESULTS: In this paper we present the first version of the Autoimmune Disease Database which to our knowledge is the first comprehensive literature-based database covering all known or suspected autoimmune diseases. This dynamically compiled database allows researchers to link autoimmune diseases to the candidate genes or proteins through the use of named entity recognition which identifies genes/proteins in the corresponding Medline abstracts. The Autoimmune Disease Database covers 103 autoimmune disease concepts. This list was expanded to include synonyms and spelling variants yielding a list of over 1,200 disease names. The current version of the database provides links to 541,690 abstracts and over 5,000 unique genes/proteins. CONCLUSION: The Autoimmune Disease Database provides the researcher with a tool to navigate potential gene-disease relationships in Medline abstracts in the context of autoimmune diseases.

Autoimmune Diseases↗

PubMed2005

ProMiner: rule-based protein and gene entity recognition.

BACKGROUND: Identification of gene and protein names in biomedical text is a challenging task as the corresponding nomenclature has evolved over time. This has led to multiple synonyms for individual genes and proteins, as well as names that may be ambiguous with other gene names or with general English words. The Gene List Task of the BioCreAtIvE challenge evaluation enables comparison of systems addressing the problem of protein and gene name identification on common benchmark data. METHODS: The ProMiner system uses a pre-processed synonym dictionary to identify potential name occurrences in the biomedical text and associate protein and gene database identifiers with the detected matches. It follows a rule-based approach and its search algorithm is geared towards recognition of multi-word names. To account for the large number of ambiguous synonyms in the considered organisms, the system has been extended to use specific variants of the detection procedure for highly ambiguous and case-sensitive synonyms. Based on all detected synonyms for one abstract, the most plausible database identifiers are associated with the text. Organism specificity is addressed by a simple procedure based on additionally detected organism names in an abstract. RESULTS: The extended ProMiner system has been applied to the test cases of the BioCreAtIvE competition with highly encouraging results. In blind predictions, the system achieved an F-measure of approximately 0.8 for the organisms mouse and fly and about 0.9 for the organism yeast.

Computational Biology↗

PubMed2003

Playing biology's name game: identifying protein names in scientific text.

A growing body of work is devoted to the extraction of protein or gene interaction information from the scientific literature. Yet, the basis for most extraction algorithms, i.e. the specific and sensitive recognition of protein and gene names and their numerous synonyms, has not been adequately addressed. Here we describe the construction of a comprehensive general purpose name dictionary and an accompanying automatic curation procedure based on a simple token model of protein names. We designed an efficient search algorithm to analyze all abstracts in MEDLINE in a reasonable amount of time on standard computers. The parameters of our method are optimized using machine learning techniques. Used in conjunction, these ingredients lead to good search performance. A supplementary web page is available at http://cartan.gmd.de/ProMiner/.

Abstracting and Indexing↗