An open source knowledge graph ecosystem for the life sciences.

Translational research requires data at multiple scales of biological organization. Advancements in sequencing and multi-omics technologies have increased the availability of these data, but researchers face significant integration challenges. Knowledge graphs (KGs) are used to model complex phenomena, and methods exist to construct them automatically. However, tackling complex biomedical integration problems requires flexibility in the way knowledge is modeled. Moreover, existing KG construction methods provide robust tooling at the cost of fixed or limited choices among knowledge representation models. PheKnowLator (Phenotype Knowledge Translator) is a semantic ecosystem for automating the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) construction of ontologically grounded KGs with fully customizable knowledge representation. The ecosystem includes KG construction resources (e.g., data preparation APIs), analysis tools (e.g., SPARQL endpoint resources and abstraction algorithms), and benchmarks (e.g., prebuilt KGs). We evaluated the ecosystem by systematically comparing it to existing open-source KG construction methods and by analyzing its computational performance when used to construct 12 different large-scale KGs. With flexible knowledge representation, PheKnowLator enables fully customizable KGs without compromising performance or usability.

RecSOI: recommending research directions using statements of ignorance.

The more science advances, the more questions are asked. This compounding growth can make it difficult to keep up with current research directions. Furthermore, this difficulty is exacerbated for junior researchers who enter fields with already large bases of potentially fruitful research avenues. In this paper, we propose a novel task and a recommender system for research directions, RecSOI, that draws from statements of ignorance (SOIs) found in the research literature. By building researchers' profiles based on textual elements, RecSOI generates personalized recommendations of potential research directions tailored to their interests. In addition, RecSOI provides context for the recommended SOIs, so that users can quickly evaluate how relevant the research direction is for them. In this paper, we provide an overview of RecSOI's functioning, implementation, and evaluation, demonstrating its effectiveness in guiding researchers through the vast landscape of potential research directions.

Integrating biological knowledge for mechanistic inference in the host-associated microbiome.

Advances in high-throughput technologies have enhanced our ability to describe microbial communities as they relate to human health and disease. Alongside the growth in sequencing data has come an influx of resources that synthesize knowledge surrounding microbial traits, functions, and metabolic potential with knowledge of how they may impact host pathways to influence disease phenotypes. These knowledge bases can enable the development of mechanistic explanations that may underlie correlations detected between microbial communities and disease. In this review, we survey existing resources and methodologies for the computational integration of broad classes of microbial and host knowledge. We evaluate these knowledge bases in their access methods, content, and source characteristics. We discuss challenges of the creation and utilization of knowledge bases including inconsistency of nomenclature assignment of taxa and metabolites across sources, whether the biological entities represented are rooted in ontologies or taxonomies, and how the structure and accessibility limit the diversity of applications and user types. We make this information available in a code and data repository at: https://github.com/lozuponelab/knowledge-source-mappings. Addressing these challenges will allow for the development of more effective tools for drawing from abundant knowledge to find new insights into microbial mechanisms in disease by fostering a systematic and unbiased exploration of existing information.

Plasma proteome of growing tumors.

Early detection of cancer is vital for the best chance of successful treatment, but half of all cancers are diagnosed at an advanced stage. A simple and reliable blood screening test applied routinely would therefore address a major unmet medical need. To gain insight into the value of protein biomarkers in early detection and stratification of cancer we determined the time course of changes in the plasma proteome of mice carrying transplanted human lung, breast, colon, or ovarian tumors. For protein measurements we used an aptamer-based assay which simultaneously measures ~ 5000 proteins. Along with tumor lineage-specific biomarkers, we also found 15 markers shared among all cancer types that included the energy metabolism enzymes glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, glucose-6-phophate isomerase and dihydrolipoyl dehydrogenase as well as several important biomarkers for maintaining protein, lipid, nucleotide, or carbohydrate balance such as tryptophanyl t-RNA synthetase and nucleoside diphosphate kinase. Using significantly altered proteins in the tumor bearing mice, we developed models to stratify tumor types and to estimate the minimum detectable tumor volume. Finally, we identified significantly enriched common and unique biological pathways among the eight tumor cell lines tested.

Creating an ignorance-base: Exploring known unknowns in the scientific literature.

BACKGROUND: Scientific discovery progresses by exploring new and uncharted territory. More specifically, it advances by a process of transforming unknown unknowns first into known unknowns, and then into knowns. Over the last few decades, researchers have developed many knowledge bases to capture and connect the knowns, which has enabled topic exploration and contextualization of experimental results. But recognizing the unknowns is also critical for finding the most pertinent questions and their answers. Prior work on known unknowns has sought to understand them, annotate them, and automate their identification. However, no knowledge-bases yet exist to capture these unknowns, and little work has focused on how scientists might use them to trace a given topic or experimental result in search of open questions and new avenues for exploration. We show here that a knowledge base of unknowns can be connected to ontologically grounded biomedical knowledge to accelerate research in the field of prenatal nutrition. RESULTS: We present the first ignorance-base, a knowledge-base created by combining classifiers to recognize ignorance statements (statements of missing or incomplete knowledge that imply a goal for knowledge) and biomedical concepts over the prenatal nutrition literature. This knowledge-base places biomedical concepts mentioned in the literature in context with the ignorance statements authors have made about them. Using our system, researchers interested in the topic of vitamin D and prenatal health were able to uncover three new avenues for exploration (immune system, respiratory system, and brain development) by searching for concepts enriched in ignorance statements. These were buried among the many standard enriched concepts. Additionally, we used the ignorance-base to enrich concepts connected to a gene list associated with vitamin D and spontaneous preterm birth and found an emerging topic of study (brain development) in an implied field (neuroscience). The researchers could look to the field of neuroscience for potential answers to the ignorance statements. CONCLUSION: Our goal is to help students, researchers, funders, and publishers better understand the state of our collective scientific ignorance (known unknowns) in order to help accelerate research through the continued illumination of and focus on the known unknowns and their respective goals for scientific knowledge.

Ontologizing health systems data at scale: making translational discovery a reality.

Common data models solve many challenges of standardizing electronic health record (EHR) data but are unable to semantically integrate all of the resources needed for deep phenotyping. Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry ontologies provide computable representations of biological knowledge and enable the integration of heterogeneous data. However, mapping EHR data to OBO ontologies requires significant manual curation and domain expertise. We introduce OMOP2OBO, an algorithm for mapping Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) vocabularies to OBO ontologies. Using OMOP2OBO, we produced mappings for 92,367 conditions, 8611 drug ingredients, and 10,673 measurement results, which covered 68-99% of concepts used in clinical practice when examined across 24 hospitals. When used to phenotype rare disease patients, the mappings helped systematically identify undiagnosed patients who might benefit from genetic testing. By aligning OMOP vocabularies to OBO ontologies our algorithm presents new opportunities to advance EHR-based deep phenotyping.

Knowledge-Driven Mechanistic Enrichment of the Preeclampsia Ignorome.

Preeclampsia is a leading cause of maternal and fetal morbidity and mortality. Currently, the only definitive treatment of preeclampsia is delivery of the placenta, which is central to the pathogenesis of the disease. Transcriptional profiling of human placenta from pregnancies complicated by preeclampsia has been extensively performed to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs). The decisions to investigate DEGs experimentally are biased by many factors, causing many DEGs to remain uninvestigated. A set of DEGs which are associated with a disease experimentally, but which have no known association to the disease in the literature are known as the ignorome. Preeclampsia has an extensive body of scientific literature, a large pool of DEG data, and only one definitive treatment. Tools facilitating knowledge-based analyses, which are capable of combining disparate data from many sources in order to suggest underlying mechanisms of action, may be a valuable resource to support discovery and improve our understanding of this disease. In this work we demonstrate how a biomedical knowledge graph (KG) can be used to identify novel preeclampsia molecular mechanisms. Existing open source biomedical resources and publicly available high-throughput transcriptional profiling data were used to identify and annotate the function of currently uninvestigated preeclampsia-associated DEGs. Experimentally investigated genes associated with preeclampsia were identified from PubMed abstracts using text-mining methodologies. The relative complement of the text-mined- and meta-analysis-derived lists were identified as the uninvestigated preeclampsia-associated DEGs (n=445), i.e., the preeclampsia ignorome. Using the KG to investigate relevant DEGs revealed 53 novel clinically relevant and biologically actionable mechanistic associations.

Molecular cartooning with knowledge graphs.

Molecular "cartoons," such as pathway diagrams, provide a visual summary of biomedical research results and hypotheses. Their ubiquitous appearance within the literature indicates their universal application in mechanistic communication. A recent survey of pathway diagrams identified 64,643 pathway figures published between 1995 and 2019 with 1,112,551 mentions of 13,464 unique human genes participating in a wide variety of biological processes. Researchers generally create these diagrams using generic diagram editing software that does not itself embody any biomedical knowledge. Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) integrate and represent knowledge in a semantically consistent way, systematically capturing biomedical knowledge similar to that in molecular cartoons. KGs have the potential to provide context and precise details useful in drawing such figures. However, KGs cannot generally be translated directly into figures. They include substantial material irrelevant to the scientific point of a given figure and are often more detailed than is appropriate. How could KGs be used to facilitate the creation of molecular diagrams? Here we present a new approach towards cartoon image creation that utilizes the semantic structure of knowledge graphs to aid the production of molecular diagrams. We introduce a set of "semantic graphical actions" that select and transform the relational information between heterogeneous entities (e.g., genes, proteins, pathways, diseases) in a KG to produce diagram schematics that meet the scientific communication needs of the user. These semantic actions search, select, filter, transform, group, arrange, connect and extract relevant subgraphs from KGs based on meaning in biological terms, e.g., a protein upstream of a target in a pathway. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, we show how semantic graphical actions on KGs could have been used to produce three existing pathway diagrams in diverse biomedical domains: Down Syndrome, COVID-19, and neuroinflammation. Our focus is on recapitulating the semantic content of the figures, not the layout, glyphs, or other aesthetic aspects. Our results suggest that the use of KGs and semantic graphical actions to produce biomedical diagrams will reduce the effort required and improve the quality of this visual form of scientific communication.

Examining linguistic shifts between preprints and publications.

Preprints allow researchers to make their findings available to the scientific community before they have undergone peer review. Studies on preprints within bioRxiv have been largely focused on article metadata and how often these preprints are downloaded, cited, published, and discussed online. A missing element that has yet to be examined is the language contained within the bioRxiv preprint repository. We sought to compare and contrast linguistic features within bioRxiv preprints to published biomedical text as a whole as this is an excellent opportunity to examine how peer review changes these documents. The most prevalent features that changed appear to be associated with typesetting and mentions of supporting information sections or additional files. In addition to text comparison, we created document embeddings derived from a preprint-trained word2vec model. We found that these embeddings are able to parse out different scientific approaches and concepts, link unannotated preprint-peer-reviewed article pairs, and identify journals that publish linguistically similar papers to a given preprint. We also used these embeddings to examine factors associated with the time elapsed between the posting of a first preprint and the appearance of a peer-reviewed publication. We found that preprints with more versions posted and more textual changes took longer to publish. Lastly, we constructed a web application (https://greenelab.github.io/preprint-similarity-search/) that allows users to identify which journals and articles that are most linguistically similar to a bioRxiv or medRxiv preprint as well as observe where the preprint would be positioned within a published article landscape.

Characterizing Patient Representations for Computational Phenotyping.

Patient representation learning methods create rich representations of complex data and have potential to further advance the development of computational phenotypes (CP). Currently, these methods are either applied to small predefined concept sets or all available patient data, limiting the potential for novel discovery and reducing the explainability of the resulting representations. We report on an extensive, data-driven characterization of the utility of patient representation learning methods for the purpose of CP development or automatization. We conducted ablation studies to examine the impact of patient representations, built using data from different combinations of data types and sampling windows on rare disease classification. We demonstrated that the data type and sampling window directly impact classification and clustering performance, and these results differ by rare disease group. Our results, although preliminary, exemplify the importance of and need for data-driven characterization in patient representation-based CP development pipelines.

Concept recognition as a machine translation problem.

BACKGROUND: Automated assignment of specific ontology concepts to mentions in text is a critical task in biomedical natural language processing, and the subject of many open shared tasks. Although the current state of the art involves the use of neural network language models as a post-processing step, the very large number of ontology classes to be recognized and the limited amount of gold-standard training data has impeded the creation of end-to-end systems based entirely on machine learning. Recently, Hailu et al. recast the concept recognition problem as a type of machine translation and demonstrated that sequence-to-sequence machine learning models have the potential to outperform multi-class classification approaches. METHODS: We systematically characterize the factors that contribute to the accuracy and efficiency of several approaches to sequence-to-sequence machine learning through extensive studies of alternative methods and hyperparameter selections. We not only identify the best-performing systems and parameters across a wide variety of ontologies but also provide insights into the widely varying resource requirements and hyperparameter robustness of alternative approaches. Analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of such systems suggest promising avenues for future improvements as well as design choices that can increase computational efficiency with small costs in performance. RESULTS: Bidirectional encoder representations from transformers for biomedical text mining (BioBERT) for span detection along with the open-source toolkit for neural machine translation (OpenNMT) for concept normalization achieve state-of-the-art performance for most ontologies annotated in the CRAFT Corpus. This approach uses substantially fewer computational resources, including hardware, memory, and time than several alternative approaches. CONCLUSIONS: Machine translation is a promising avenue for fully machine-learning-based concept recognition that achieves state-of-the-art results on the CRAFT Corpus, evaluated via a direct comparison to previous results from the 2019 CRAFT shared task. Experiments illuminating the reasons for the surprisingly good performance of sequence-to-sequence methods targeting ontology identifiers suggest that further progress may be possible by mapping to alternative target concept representations. All code and models can be found at: https://github.com/UCDenver-ccp/Concept-Recognition-as-Translation .

Identifying and classifying goals for scientific knowledge.

MOTIVATION: Science progresses by posing good questions, yet work in biomedical text mining has not focused on them much. We propose a novel idea for biomedical natural language processing: identifying and characterizing the questions stated in the biomedical literature. Formally, the task is to identify and characterize statements of ignorance, statements where scientific knowledge is missing or incomplete. The creation of such technology could have many significant impacts, from the training of PhD students to ranking publications and prioritizing funding based on particular questions of interest. The work presented here is intended as the first step towards these goals. RESULTS: We present a novel ignorance taxonomy driven by the role statements of ignorance play in research, identifying specific goals for future scientific knowledge. Using this taxonomy and reliable annotation guidelines (inter-annotator agreement above 80%), we created a gold standard ignorance corpus of 60 full-text documents from the prenatal nutrition literature with over 10 000 annotations and used it to train classifiers that achieved over 0.80 F1 scores. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Corpus and source code freely available for download at https://github.com/UCDenver-ccp/Ignorance-Question-Work. The source code is implemented in Python.

Characterization of Anonymous Physician Perspectives on COVID-19 Using Social Media Data.

Physicians' beliefs and attitudes about COVID-19 are important to ascertain because of their central role in providing care to patients during the pandemic. Identifying topics and sentiments discussed by physicians and other healthcare workers can lead to identification of gaps relating to theCOVID-19 pandemic response within the healthcare system. To better understand physicians' perspectives on the COVID-19 response, we extracted Twitter data from a specific user group that allows physicians to stay anonymous while expressing their perspectives about the COVID-19 pandemic. All tweets were in English. We measured most frequent bigrams and trigrams, compared sentiment analysis methods, and compared our findings to a larger Twitter dataset containing general COVID-19 related discourse. We found significant differences between the two datasets for specific topical phrases. No statistically significant difference was found in sentiments between the two datasets, and both trended slightly more positive than negative. Upon comparison to manual sentiment analysis, it was determined that these sentiment analysis methods should be improved to accurately capture sentiments of anonymous physician data. Anonymous physician social media data is a unique source of information that provides important insights into COVID-19 perspectives.

Applying knowledge-driven mechanistic inference to toxicogenomics.

When considering toxic chemicals in the environment, a mechanistic, causal explanation of toxicity may be preferred over a statistical or machine learning-based prediction by itself. Elucidating a mechanism of toxicity is, however, a costly and time-consuming process that requires the participation of specialists from a variety of fields, often relying on animal models. We present an innovative mechanistic inference framework (MechSpy), which can be used as a hypothesis generation aid to narrow the scope of mechanistic toxicology analysis. MechSpy generates hypotheses of the most likely mechanisms of toxicity, by combining a semantically-interconnected knowledge representation of human biology, toxicology and biochemistry with gene expression time series on human tissue. Using vector representations of biological entities, MechSpy seeks enrichment in a manually curated list of high-level mechanisms of toxicity, represented as biochemically- and causally-linked ontology concepts. Besides predicting the canonical mechanism of toxicity for many well-studied compounds, we experimentally validated some of our predictions for other chemicals without an established mechanism of toxicity. This mechanistic inference framework is an advantageous tool for predictive toxicology, and the first of its kind to produce a mechanistic explanation for each prediction. MechSpy can be modified to include additional mechanisms of toxicity, and is generalizable to other types of mechanisms of human biology.

Knowledge-Based Biomedical Data Science.

Knowledge-based biomedical data science involves the design and implementation of computer systems that act as if they knew about biomedicine. Such systems depend on formally represented knowledge in computer systems, often in the form of knowledge graphs. Here we survey recent progress in systems that use formally represented knowledge to address data science problems in both clinical and biological domains, as well as progress on approaches for creating knowledge graphs. Major themes include the relationships between knowledge graphs and machine learning, the use of natural language processing to construct knowledge graphs, and the expansion of novel knowledge-based approaches to clinical and biological domains.

P-Hacking Lexical Richness Through Definitions of "Type" and "Token".

"P-hacking" is the repeated analysis of data until a statistically significant result is achieved. We show that p-hacking can also occur during data generation, sometimes unintentionally. We use the type-token ratio to demonstrate that differences in the definitions of "type" and "token" can produce significantly different results. Since these terms are rarely defined in the biomedical literature, the result is an inability to meaningfully interpret the body of literature that makes use of this measure.

Interpersonal prosodic correlation in frontotemporal dementia.

Communication accommodation describes how individuals adjust their communicative style to that of their conversational partner. We predicted that interpersonal prosodic correlation related to pitch and timing would be decreased in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). We predicted that the interpersonal correlation in a timing measure and a pitch measure would be increased in right temporal FTD (rtFTD) due to sparing of the neural substrate for speech timing and pitch modulation but loss of social semantics. We found no significant effects in bvFTD, but conversations including rtFTD demonstrated higher interpersonal correlations in speech rate than healthy controls.

Semantic integration of clinical laboratory tests from electronic health records for deep phenotyping and biomarker discovery.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems typically define laboratory test results using the Laboratory Observation Identifier Names and Codes (LOINC) and can transmit them using Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) standards. LOINC has not yet been semantically integrated with computational resources for phenotype analysis. Here, we provide a method for mapping LOINC-encoded laboratory test results transmitted in FHIR standards to Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) terms. We annotated the medical implications of 2923 commonly used laboratory tests with HPO terms. Using these annotations, our software assesses laboratory test results and converts each result into an HPO term. We validated our approach with EHR data from 15,681 patients with respiratory complaints and identified known biomarkers for asthma. Finally, we provide a freely available SMART on FHIR application that can be used within EHR systems. Our approach allows readily available laboratory tests in EHR to be reused for deep phenotyping and exploits the hierarchical structure of HPO to integrate distinct tests that have comparable medical interpretations for association studies.

Three Dimensions of Reproducibility in Natural Language Processing.

Despite considerable recent attention to problems with reproducibility of scientific research, there is a striking lack of agreement about the definition of the term. That is a problem, because the lack of a consensus definition makes it difficult to compare studies of reproducibility, and thus to have even a broad overview of the state of the issue in natural language processing. This paper proposes an ontology of reproducibility in that field. Its goal is to enhance both future research and communication about the topic, and retrospective meta-analyses. We show that three dimensions of reproducibility, corresponding to three kinds of claims in natural language processing papers, can account for a variety of types of research reports. These dimensions are reproducibility of a conclusion, of a finding, and of a value. Three biomedical natural language processing papers by the authors of this paper are analyzed with respect to these dimensions.

OWL-NETS: Transforming OWL Representations for Improved Network Inference.

Our knowledge of the biological mechanisms underlying complex human disease is largely incomplete. While Semantic Web technologies, such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL), provide powerful techniques for representing existing knowledge, well-established OWL reasoners are unable to account for missing or uncertain knowledge. The application of inductive inference methods, like machine learning and network inference are vital for extending our current knowledge. Therefore, robust methods which facilitate inductive inference on rich OWL-encoded knowledge are needed. Here, we propose OWL-NETS (NEtwork Transformation for Statistical learning), a novel computational method that reversibly abstracts OWL-encoded biomedical knowledge into a network representation tailored for network inference. Using several examples built with the Open Biomedical Ontologies, we show that OWL-NETS can leverage existing ontology-based knowledge representations and network inference methods to generate novel, biologically-relevant hypotheses. Further, the lossless transformation of OWL-NETS allows for seamless integration of inferred edges back into the original knowledge base, extending its coverage and completeness.