Researchers from IDIBAPS and Hospital Clínic create the first application containing all the available knowledge on Multiple Sclerosis

Researchers from IDIBAPS and Hospital Clinic of Barcelona have created the first ontology that contains knowledge about Multiple Sclerosis (MS) to advance in translational and clinical research about this disease. This tool allows gathering useful information about the treatments or diseases associated with MS which can be found both in scientific articles and medical records. In the study, coordinated by Dr. Pablo Villoslada, head of the IDIBAPS group Pathogenesis and new treatments in multiple sclerosis, Dr. Xavier Pastor and Dr. Raimundo Lozano form the Medical Informatics Unit of Hospital Clinic, and Dr. Albert Saiz, from the Neurology Department at the hospital, have participated.

A medical ontology is a computational representation that contains, in an explicit way, the available knowledge on a particular disease, the secondary diseases and existent relationships between them (comorbidity), and allows extracting information. This is a very powerful tool since the concepts are clearly identified and the information is independent of language or synonyms that can be used to designate the same concept.

MS is a longstanding chronic disease and, to understand it, it is necessary to integrate a lot of information coming from different sources: scientific articles, databases or medical information in clinical notes.

In the article published in Plos One, researchers used text-mining tools and analyzed in parallel anonymized data from the clinical notes of 600 patients with MS from Hospital Clínic and scientific articles related to this disease published in PubMed, the search portal of the National Library of Medicine of the United States. The concepts related to the illness and other data needed to develop the ontology were extracted.

To validate this specific ontology, researchers crossed the results of the two approaches (patient records and articles referenced in Pubmed EM) to find comorbidities. They found out that the coexisting diseases were the same. It also allowed them to discover relationships that were not described in the texts.

This medical ontology, the first one for Multiple Sclerosis, is already available for the scientific community in the repository of ontologies “BioPortal” of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology”, and will help to advance the clinical and translational research disease.

Article reference:

Knowledge retrieval from PubMed abstracts and electronic medical records with the Multiple Sclerosis Ontology.

Malhotra A, Gündel M, Rajput AM, Mevissen HT, Saiz A, Pastor X, Lozano-Rubi R, Martinez-Lapiscina EH, Zubizarreta I, Mueller B, Kotelnikova E, Toldo L, Hofmann-Apitius M, Villoslada P.

PLoS One. 2015 Feb 9;10(2):e0116718. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0116718. eCollection 2015. PMID: 25665127