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38 Publications visible to you, out of a total of 38

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BACKGROUND: Although decision-makers in health care settings need to read and understand the validity of quantitative reports, they do not always carefully read information on research methods. Presenting the methods in a more structured way could improve the time spent reading the methods and increase the perceived relevance of this important report section. OBJECTIVE: To test the effect of a structured summary of the methods used in a quantitative data report on reading behavior with eye-tracking and measure the effect on the perceived importance of this section. METHODS: A nonrandomized pilot trial was performed in a computer laboratory setting with advanced medical students. All participants were asked to read a quantitative data report; an intervention arm was also shown a textbox summarizing key features of the methods used in the report. Three data-collection methods were used to document reading behavior and the views of participants: eye-tracking (during reading), a written questionnaire, and a face-to-face interview. RESULTS: We included 35 participants, 22 in the control arm and 13 in the intervention arm. The overall time spent reading the methods did not differ between the 2 arms. The intervention arm considered the information in the methods section to be less helpful for decision-making than did the control arm (scores for perceived helpfulness were 4.1 and 2.9, respectively, range 1-10). Participants who read the box more intensively tended to spend more time on the methods as a whole (Pearson correlation 0.81, P=.001). CONCLUSIONS: Adding a structured summary of information on research methods attracted attention from most participants, but did not increase the time spent on reading the methods or lead to increased perceptions that the methods section was helpful for decision-making. Participants made use of the summary to quickly judge the methods, but this did not increase the perceived relevance of this section.

Authors: J. Koetsenruijter, P. Wronski, S. Ghosh, W. Muller, M. Wensing

Date Published: 12th Apr 2022

Publication Type: Journal

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In this white paper, we describe the founding of a new ELIXIR Community - the Systems Biology Community - and its proposed future contributions to both ELIXIR and the broader community of systems biologists in Europe and worldwide. The Community believes that the infrastructure aspects of systems biology - databases, (modelling) tools and standards development, as well as training and access to cloud infrastructure - are not only appropriate components of the ELIXIR infrastructure, but will prove key components of ELIXIR’s future support of advanced biological applications and personalised medicine. By way of a series of meetings, the Community identified seven key areas for its future activities, reflecting both future needs and previous and current activities within ELIXIR Platforms and Communities. These are: overcoming barriers to the wider uptake of systems biology; linking new and existing data to systems biology models; interoperability of systems biology resources; further development and embedding of systems medicine; provisioning of modelling as a service; building and coordinating capacity building and training resources; and supporting industrial embedding of systems biology. A set of objectives for the Community has been identified under four main headline areas: Standardisation and Interoperability, Technology, Capacity Building and Training, and Industrial Embedding. These are grouped into short-term (3-year), mid-term (6-year) and long-term (10-year) objectives.

Authors: Vitor Martins dos Santos, Mihail Anton, Barbara Szomolay, Marek Ostaszewski, Ilja Arts, Rui Benfeitas, Victoria Dominguez Del Angel, Polonca Ferk, Dirk Fey, Carole Goble, Martin Golebiewski, Kristina Gruden, Katharina F. Heil, Henning Hermjakob, Pascal Kahlem, Maria I. Klapa, Jasper Koehorst, Alexey Kolodkin, Martina Kutmon, Brane Leskošek, Sébastien Moretti, Wolfgang Müller, Marco Pagni, Tadeja Rezen, Miguel Rocha, Damjana Rozman, David Šafránek, Rahuman S. Malik Sheriff, Maria Suarez Diez, Kristel Van Steen, Hans V Westerhoff, Ulrike Wittig, Katherine Wolstencroft, Anze Zupanic, Chris T. Evelo, John M. Hancock

Date Published: 2022

Publication Type: Journal

Abstract (Expand)

Background: Quantitative data reports are widely produced to inform health policy decisions. Policymakers are expected to critically assess provided information in order to incorporate the best available evidence into the decision-making process. Many other factors are known to influence this process, but little is known about how quantitative data reports are actually read. We explored the reading behavior of (future) health policy decision-makers, using innovative methods. Methods: We conducted a computer-assisted laboratory study, involving starting and advanced students in medicine and health sciences, and professionals as participants. They read a quantitative data report to inform a decision on the use of resources for long-term care in dementia in a hypothetical decision scenario. Data were collected through eye-tracking, questionnaires, and a brief interview. Eye-tracking data were used to generate ‘heatmaps’ and five measures of reading behavior. The questionnaires provided participants’ perceptions of understandability and helpfulness as well as individual characteristics. Interviews documented reasons for attention to specific report sections. The quantitative analysis was largely descriptive, complemented by Pearson correlations. Interviews were analyzed by qualitative content analysis. Results: In total, 46 individuals participated [students (85%), professionals (15%)]. Eye-tracking observations showed that the participants spent equal time and attention for most parts of the presented report, but were less focused when reading the methods section. The qualitative content analysis identified 29 reasons for attention to a report section related to four topics. Eye-tracking measures were largely unrelated to participants’ perceptions of understandability and helpfulness of the report. Conclusions: Eye-tracking data added information on reading behaviors that were not captured by questionnaires or interviews with health decision-makers.

Authors: Pamela Wronski, Michel Wensing, Sucheta Ghosh, Lukas Gärttner, Wolfgang Müller, Jan Koetsenruijter

Date Published: 1st Dec 2021

Publication Type: Journal

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Chemical named entity recognition (NER) is a significant step for many downstream applications like entity linking for the chemical text-mining pipeline. However, the identification of chemical entities in a biomedical text is a challenging task due to the diverse morphology of chemical entities and the different types of chemical nomenclature. In this work, we describe our approach that was submitted for BioCreative version 7 challenge Track 2, focusing on the ‘Chemical Identification’ task for identifying chemical entities and entity linking, using MeSH. For this purpose, we have applied a two-stage approach as follows (a) usage of fine-tuned BioBERT for identification of chemical entities (b) semantic approximate search in MeSH and PubChem databases for entity linking. There was some friction between the two approaches, as our rule-based approach did not harmonise optimally with partially recognized words forwarded by the BERT component. For our future work, we aim to resolve the issue of the artefacts arising from BERT tokenizers and develop joint learning of chemical named entity recognition and entity linking using pre-trained transformer-based models and compare their performance with our preliminary approach. Next, we will improve the efficiency of our approximate search in reference databases during entity linking. This task is non-trivial as it entails determining similarity scores of large sets of trees with respect to a query tree. Ideally, this will enable flexible parametrization and rule selection for the entity linking search.

Authors: Ghadeer Mobasher, Lukrécia Mertová, Sucheta Ghosh, Olga Krebs, Bettina Heinlein, Wolfgang Müller

Date Published: 11th Nov 2021

Publication Type: Proceedings

Abstract

Not specified

Authors: Sucheta Ghosh, Pamela Wronski, Jan Koetsenruijter, Wolfgang Mueller, Michel Wensing

Date Published: 27th Sep 2021

Publication Type: Journal

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This article describes some use case studies and self-assessments of FAIR status of de.NBI services to illustrate the challenges and requirements for the definition of the needs of adhering to the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) data principles in a large distributed bioinformatics infrastructure. We address the challenge of heterogeneity of wet lab technologies, data, metadata, software, computational workflows and the levels of implementation and monitoring of FAIR principles within the different bioinformatics sub-disciplines joint in de.NBI. On the one hand, this broad service landscape and the excellent network of experts are a strong basis for the development of useful research data management plans. On the other hand, the large number of tools and techniques maintained by distributed teams renders FAIR compliance challenging.

Authors: G. Mayer, W. Muller, K. Schork, J. Uszkoreit, A. Weidemann, U. Wittig, M. Rey, C. Quast, J. Felden, F. O. Glockner, M. Lange, D. Arend, S. Beier, A. Junker, U. Scholz, D. Schuler, H. A. Kestler, D. Wibberg, A. Puhler, S. Twardziok, J. Eils, R. Eils, S. Hoffmann, M. Eisenacher, M. Turewicz

Date Published: 2nd Sep 2021

Publication Type: Journal

Abstract (Expand)

Epidemiologische und klinische Studien sind standardisiert und gut dokumentiert, jedoch erfüllen Studienprotokolle, eingesetzte Erhebungsinstrumente und erhobene Daten die Anforderungen der FAIR-Prinzipien nicht in ausreichendem Maße. NFDI4Health wird daher eine Struktur schaffen, die eine zentrale Suche nach existierenden, dezentral verwalteten Datenkörpern und zugehörigen Dokumenten sowie einen FAIRen Zugang zu diesen erleichtert. Dazu werden die Auffindbarkeit und der Zugang zu strukturierten Gesundheitsdaten aus Registern, administrativen Gesundheitsdatenbanken, klinischen und epidemiologischen sowie Public Health-Studien verbessert und die Qualität und Harmonisierung der zugrundeliegenden Daten optimiert. Eine weitere Herausforderung entsteht durch die Verwendung personenbezogener Gesundheitsdaten. Diese sind hoch sensibel, so dass ihre Nutzung restriktive Datenschutzbestimmungen und informierte Einwilligungserklärungen der Studienteilnehmenden erfordert, was jedoch ihre Wiederverwendbarkeit einschränkt. NFDI4Health zielt daher darauf ab, den Austausch und die Verknüpfung von personenbezogenen Gesundheitsdaten sowie verteilte Datenanalysen unter Einhaltung datenschutzrechtlicher und ethischer Bestimmungen zu erleichtern. Um dies möglichst effizient zu erreichen, wird NFDI4Health die Entwicklung neuer, maschinenprozessierbarer Zustimmungsmöglichkeiten sowie innovativer Datenzugriffsservices auf Grundlage der FAIR-Prinzipien vorantreiben und die Interoperabilität von IT-Lösungen für Metadatenrepositorien stärken. Komplementiert wird dies durch die Entwicklung entsprechender Angebote für Training und Ausbildung, um der Herausforderung der Umsetzung der Lösungen in den Universitäten und Forschungseinrichtungen zu begegnen. Schließlich wird durch die gemeinsame Arbeit in der NFDI4Health die Kooperation zwischen klinischer und epidemiologischer/Public Health-Forschung gestärkt.

Authors: Juliane Fluck, Birte Lindstädt, Wolfgang Ahrens, Oya Beyan, Benedikt Buchner, Johannes Darms, Ralf Depping, Jens Dierkes, Hubertus Neuhausen, Wolfgang Müller, Hajo Zeeb, Martin Golebiewski, Markus Löffler, Matthias Löbe, Frank Meineke, Sebastian Klammt, Holger Fröhlich, Horst Hahn, Matthias Schulze, Tobias Pischon, Ute Nöthlings, Ulrich Sax, Harald Kusch, Linus Grabenhenrich, Carsten Oliver Schmidt, Dagmar Waltemath, Sebastian Semler, Juliane Gehrke, Toralf Kirsten, Fabian Praßer, Sylvia Thun, Lothar Wieler, Iris Pigeot

Date Published: 28th Jul 2021

Publication Type: Misc

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