Prototypical case mining from biomedical literature for bootstrapping a case base

摘要

This article addresses the task of mining for cases from biomedical literature to automatically build an initial case base for a case-based reasoning (CBR) system. This research takes place within the Mémoire project, which has for goal to provide a framework to facilitate building CBR systems in biology and medicine. By analyzing medical literature, the ProCaseMiner system mines for medical concepts such as diseases, signs and symptoms, laboratory tests, and treatment plans in relationship with one another, and connects them together in a given medical domain. It then organizes these concepts in a higher-level structure called a case. This case mining component provides a definite help to bootstrap the creation of a biomedical CBR system case base, composed of both concrete cases and prototypical cases. Currently, most cases learnt correspond to prototypical cases, given the level of abstraction of their features. This article validates the approach by presenting a comparison between the prototypical cases learnt from stem-cell transplantation domain with those created by a team of experts in the domain.