30664092
Mining Candidate Viruses as Potential Bio-terrorism Weapons from Biomedical Literature
In this paper we present a semantic-based data mining approach to identify candidate viruses as potential bio-terrorism weapons from biomedical literature. We first identify all the possible properties of viruses as search key words based on Geissler’s 13 criteria; the identified properties are then defined using MeSH terms. Then, we assign each property an importance weight based on domain experts’ judgment. After generating all the possible valid combinations of the properties, we search the biomedical literature, retrieving all the relevant documents. Next our method extracts virus names from the downloaded documents for each search keyword and identifies the novel connection of the virus according to these 4 properties. If a virus is found in the different document sets obtained by several search keywords, the virus should be considered as suspicious and treated as candidate viruses for bio-terrorism. Our findings are intended as a guide to the virus literature to support further studies that might then lead to appropriate defense and public health measures.
11903789
A semantic-based approach for mining undiscovered public knowledge from biomedical literature
The problem of mining undiscovered public knowledge from biomedical literature was exemplified by Swanson's pioneering work on Raynaud disease/fish-oil discovery in 1986. Since then, there have been many approaches to mine undiscovered public knowledge from biomedical literature. This paper presents a semantic-based approach for mining undiscovered public knowledge from biomedical literature. The method takes advantages of the biomedical ontologies, MeSH and UMLS, as the source of semantic knowledge. A prototype system Biomedical Semantic-based Knowledge Discovery System (Bio-SbKDS) is designed to uncover novel hypothesis/connections hidden in the biomedical literature. Using the semantic types and semantic relations of the biomedical concepts, Bio-SbKDS can identify the relevant concepts collected from Medline and generate the novel hypothesis between these concepts. Bio-SbKDS successfully replicates Dr. Swanson's two famous discoveries: Raynaud disease/fish oil and migraine/magnesium. Compared with previous approaches, our method searches much less articles, generates much less but more relevant novel hypotheses, requires much less human intervention in the discovery procedure.
6833692
Clustering Large Collection of Biomedical Literature Based on Ontology-Enriched Bipartite Graph Representation and Mutual Refinement Strategy
In this paper we introduce a novel document clustering approach that solves some major problems of traditional document clustering approaches. Instead of depending on traditional vector space model, this approach represents a set of documents as bipartite graphs using domain knowledge in ontology. In this representation, the concepts of the documents are classified according to their relationships with documents that are reflected on the bipartite graph. Using the concept groups, documents are clustered based on the concepts' contribution to each document. Through the mutual-refinement relationship with concept groups and document groups, the two groups are recursively refined. Our experimental results on MEDLINE articles show that our approach outperforms two leading document clustering algorithms: BiSecting K-means and CLUTO. In addition to its decent performance, our approach provides a meaningful explanation for each document cluster by identifying its most contributing concepts, thus helps users to understand and interpret documents and clustering results.
2425436
Cluster Ensemble and Its Applications in Gene Expression Analysis
Huge amount of gene expression data have been generated as a result of the human genomic project. Clustering has been used extensively in mining these gene expression data to find important genetic and biological information. Obtaining high quality clustering results is very challenging because of the inconsistency of the results of different clustering algorithms and noise in the gene expression data. Many clustering algorithms are available and different clustering algorithms may generate different clustering results due to their bias and assumptions. It is a challenging and daunting task for the genomic researchers to choose the best clustering algorithm and generate the best clustering results for their data sets. In this paper, we present a cluster ensemble framework for gene expression analysis to generate high quality and robust clustering results. In our framework, the clustering results of individual clustering algorithm are converted into a distance matrix, these distance matrices are combined and a weighted graph is constructed according to the combined matrix. Then a graph partitioning approach is used to cluster the graph to generate the final clusters. The experiment results indicate that cluster ensemble approach yields better clustering results than the single best clustering algorithm on both synthetic data set and yeast gene expression data set.
2454583
Temporal rule induction for clinical outcome analysis
Clinical outcomes analysis normally covers a particular time period. The sample under study is constantly changing as patients are censored, leave the study or die. In this paper, we present a novel data mining approach to mine temporal rules that reflect characteristics of outcomes analysis. We apply our temporal rule induction algorithm to a set of cancer patients, clinical records that were prospectively collected for 20 years. We analyse clinical data not only based on the static event, such as local recurrence for survival analysis, but also based on the temporal event with censored data for each time unit. The rules extracted from our temporal rule induction algorithm are compared to results from statistical analysis. The importance of this paper is that this novel temporal rule induction algorithm provides valuable insights for clinical data assessment and complements traditional statistical analysis.
14024342
A Semantic Approach for Mining Hidden Links from Complementary and Non-interactive Biomedical Literature
Two complementary and non-interactive literature sets of articles, when they are considered together, can reveal useful information of scientific interest not apparent in either of the two sets alone. Swanson called the existence of such hidden links as undiscovered public knowledge (UPK). The novel connection between Raynaud disease and fish oils was uncovered from complementary and non-interactive biomedical literature by Swanson in 1986. Since then, there have been many approaches to uncover UPK by mining the biomedical literature. These earlier works, however, required substantial manual intervention to reduce the number of possible connections. This paper proposes a semantic-based mining model for undiscovered public knowledge using the biomedical literature. Our method replaces manual ad-hoc pruning by using semantic knowledge from the biomedical ontologies. Using the semantic types and semantic relationships of the biomedical concepts, our prototype system can identify the relevant concepts collected from Medline and generate the novel hypothesis between these concepts. The system successfully replicates Swanson’s two famous discoveries: Raynaud disease/fish oils and migraine/magnesium. Compared with previous approaches such as LSI-based and traditional association rule-based methods, our method generates much fewer but more relevant novel hypotheses, and requires much less human intervention in the discovery procedure
27491397
Hot spot detection based on feature space representation of visual search
This paper presents a new framework for capturing intrinsic visual search behavior of different observers in image understanding by analysing saccadic eye movements in feature space. The method is based on the information theory for identifying salient image features based on which visual search is performed. We demonstrate how to obtain feature space fixation density functions that are normalized to the image content along the scan paths. This allows a reliable identification of salient image features that can be mapped back to spatial space for highlighting regions of interest and attention selection. A two-color conjunction search experiment has been implemented to illustrate the theoretical framework of the proposed method including feature selection, hot spot detection, and back-projection. The practical value of the method is demonstrated with computed tomography image of centrilobular emphysema, and we discuss how the proposed framework can be used as a basis for decision support in medical image understanding.
12307619
The use of visual search for knowledge gathering in image decision support
This paper presents a new method of knowledge gathering for decision support in image understanding based on information extracted from the dynamics of saccadic eye movements. The framework involves the construction of a generic image feature extraction library, from which the feature extractors that are most relevant to the visual assessment by domain experts are determined automatically through factor analysis. The dynamics of the visual search are analyzed by using the Markov model for providing training information to novices on how and where to look for image features. The validity of the framework has been evaluated in a clinical scenario whereby the pulmonary vascular distribution on Computed Tomography images was assessed by experienced radiologists as a potential indicator of heart failure. The performance of the system has been demonstrated by training four novices to follow the visual assessment behavior of two experienced observers. In all cases, the accuracy of the students improved from near random decision making (33%) to accuracies ranging from 50% to 68%.
206601195
The Role of Discourse Structure and Response Time in Multimodal Communication
In an ongoing project on multimodal communication in humans and agents [1], we investigate the interaction between two linguistic modalities (prosody and dialog structure) and two non-linguistic modalities (eye gaze and facial expressions). The goal is to gain a better understanding of the use of communicative channels in discourse and can subsequently aid the development of more effective animated conversational agents. We studied conversations between humans involved in the Map Task scenario whereby an Instruction Giver (IG) navigates an Instruction Follower (IF) from a starting point to an end point on a map [2].
30458595
Finding an Optimal Path without Growing the Tree
In this paper, we study a class of optimal path problems with the following phenomenon: The space complexity of the algorithms for reporting the lengths of single-source optimal paths for these problems is asymptotically smaller than the space complexity of the "standard" treegrowing algorithms for finding actual optimal paths. We present a general and efficient algorithmic paradigm for finding an actual optimal path for such problems without having to grow a single-source optimal path tree. Our paradigm is based on the "marriage-before-conquer" strategy, the prune-and-search technique, and a data structure called clipped trees. The paradigm enables us to compute an actual path for a number of optimal path problems and dynamic programming problems in computational geometry, graph theory, and combinatorial optimization. Our algorithmic solutions improve the space bounds (in certain cases, the time bounds as well) of the previously best known algorithms, and settle some open problems. Our techniques are likely to be applicable to other problems.
19915888
Node merging in Kohonen's self-organizing mapping of fMRI data
In this paper, Kohonen's self-organizing mapping (SOM) is used as a data-driven technique for analyzing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Upon the completion of an SOM analysis, a cluster merging technique, based on examining the reproducibility of the fMRI data across epochs, is utilized to merge SOM nodes whose feature vectors are sufficiently similar to one another. The resulting 'super nodes' give time course templates of potential interest. These templates can be subsequently used in traditional template-based analysis methods, such as cross-correlation analysis, yielding statistical maps and activation patterns. This technique has been demonstrated on two fMRI datasets obtained from a visually-guided motor paradigm and a visual paradigm, respectively, showing satisfactory results.