Mining microbe–disease interactions from literature via a transfer learning model

• Main Authors: Chen, J.X (Author), Qiu, Y. (Author), Wu, C. (Author), Xiao, X. (Author), Yang, C. (Author), Yi, J. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: BioMed Central Ltd 2021
• Subjects: Bacteria; Biomedical literature; Biomedical research; Biomedical Research; data mining; Data Mining; Deep learning; Detection performance; Drug interactions; Evaluation results; Interaction extraction; Large-scale database; Learning systems; machine learning; Machine Learning; medical research; Microbe–disease interactions; Named entity recognition; Named-entity recognition; Natural language processing systems; publication; Publications; Query processing; Relation extraction; Structured database; Text mining; Transfer learning; User interfaces
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 Background: Interactions of microbes and diseases are of great importance for biomedical research. However, large-scale of microbe–disease interactions are hidden in the biomedical literature. The structured databases for microbe–disease interactions are in limited amounts. In this paper, we aim to construct a large-scale database for microbe–disease interactions automatically. We attained this goal via applying text mining methods based on a deep learning model with a moderate curation cost. We also built a user-friendly web interface that allows researchers to navigate and query required information. Results: Firstly, we manually constructed a golden-standard corpus and a sliver-standard corpus (SSC) for microbe–disease interactions for curation. Moreover, we proposed a text mining framework for microbe–disease interaction extraction based on a pretrained model BERE. We applied named entity recognition tools to detect microbe and disease mentions from the free biomedical texts. After that, we fine-tuned the pretrained model BERE to recognize relations between targeted entities, which was originally built for drug–target interactions or drug–drug interactions. The introduction of SSC for model fine-tuning greatly improved detection performance for microbe–disease interactions, with an average reduction in error of approximately 10%. The MDIDB website offers data browsing, custom searching for specific diseases or microbes, and batch downloading. Conclusions: Evaluation results demonstrate that our method outperform the baseline model (rule-based PKDE4J) with an average F1-score of 73.81%. For further validation, we randomly sampled nearly 1000 predicted interactions by our model, and manually checked the correctness of each interaction, which gives a 73% accuracy. The MDIDB webiste is freely avaliable throuth http://dbmdi.com/index/. © 2021, The Author(s).