Tracking medical genetic literature through machine learning.

Abstract

There has been remarkable progress in identifying the causes of genetic conditions as well as understanding how changes in specific genes cause disease. Though difficult (and often superficial) to parse, an interesting tension involves emphasis on basic research aimed to dissect normal and abnormal biology versus more clearly clinical and therapeutic investigations. To examine one facet of this question and to better understand progress in Mendelian-related research, we developed an algorithm that classifies medical literature into three categories (Basic, Clinical, and Management) and conducted a retrospective analysis. We built a supervised machine learning classification model using the Azure Machine Learning (ML) Platform and analyzed the literature (1970-2014) from NCBI's Entrez Gene2Pubmed Database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene) using genes from the NHGRI's Clinical Genomics Database (http://research.nhgri.nih.gov/CGD/). We applied our model to 376,738 articles: 288,639 (76.6%) were classified as Basic, 54,178 (14.4%) as Clinical, and 24,569 (6.5%) as Management. The average classification accuracy was 92.2%. The rate of Clinical publication was significantly higher than Basic or Management. The rate of publication of article types differed significantly when divided into key eras: Human Genome Project (HGP) planning phase (1984-1990); HGP launch (1990) to publication (2001); following HGP completion to the "Next Generation" advent (2009); the era following 2009. In conclusion, in addition to the findings regarding the pace and focus of genetic progress, our algorithm produced a database that can be used in a variety of contexts including automating the identification of management-related literature.