I am looking forward to talking with folks from the Biomedical Informatics Center at George Washington University next week about “Using semantics to scale up evidence-based chemical risk-assessments and the implications to cancer research.”
Current methods used to conduct chemical risk assessments do not scale to recent regulatory changes such as the European Union’s REACH initiative that dramatically increases the number of chemicals to be assessed and the US EPAs trend towards cumulative risk assessments that consider multiple chemicals or combinations of chemical and non-chemical stressors. I will describe an automated approach that uses semantics to identify target outcomes and then captures supporting, refuting, or neutral with respect to the given target. The system scales to 482K abstracts and show that a user’s decision would change for 21 out of the 27 chemicals explored if only the retrieval step was considered instead of the extraction step. I will discuss the implications of this finding to cancer research.
This work is based on work with Jodi Flaws. More details can be found https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0260712
