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URL: http://www.elsevier.com/online-tools/pathway-studio/biological-database

Proper Citation: MedScan (RRID:SCR_003314)

Description: THIS RESOURCE IS NO LONGER IN SERVICE. Documented on January 5, 2023. MedScan is a fast and flexible biomedical information extraction technology. It uses dictionaries to identify individual biomedical terms (proteins, cellular processes, small molecules, diseases, etc) referred to in literature articles, and applies advanced natural language processing techniques to detect the relationships within the article and extract these terms and the relationships; the overall process of detection, identification, extraction and assembling, is termed Information Harvesting. Information extracted by MedScan represents the multiple aspects of protein function, including protein modification, cellular localization, protein-protein interactions, gene expression regulation, molecular transport and synthesis, as well as association with diseases, and regulation of various cellular processes. This scope can be broadened by modifying information extraction rules and the dictionaries. Dictionaries can be assembled on any topic or area that is represented in the literature you wish to harvest. High-throughput data generation methodologies like microarray gene expression require new approaches for gathering information for data analysis. For the best results, computational approaches used for high-throughput data analysis require that biological information from the literature be a coherent and integrated part of the analysis software itself. Pathway Studio meets this challenge through its MedScan Technology and underlying ResNet database. All editions of Pathway Studio contain MedScan Technology to harvest information from the literature and to save this information in the Pathway Studio ResNet database ready for data analysis. MedScan is more than a web search engine. Indeed, the output of a Google search can be channeled into MedScan for example. Web searches, like Google, are excellent at finding items as a result of a query. A quick look at the output list usually locates the item for which you are looking. This approach however, is not well suited for information and knowledge gathering. Also, once information is gathered, where do you put it for later computational use? MedScan meets this challenge for the area of biomedical literature and biomedical online information. PubMed meets the needs for a central repository of biomedical literature. Researchers can go to PubMed and search for any topic and articles of interest, much like a web type of search. However, just like a web type of search, PubMed also provides a list of all the hits with a link to the articles. If a single article, or even just a few, are sought, this search approach is useful. Alternatively, MedScan will list all the articles of interest but additionally scans the text for relationships, highlights these relationships in the articles and then lists these relationships and the biological molecules and processes involved in the relationships in separate tables. The tables of relationships can be viewed graphically in Pathway Studio and can be saved into the ResNet database for use in experimental data analysis.

Synonyms: MedScan

Resource Type: data processing software, software resource, data acquisition software, software application

Defining Citation: PMID:15033866

Keywords: expression, function, article, biological, biomedical, cellular, dictionary, disease, information, literature, localization, medline interfaces, modification, molecule, process, protein, regulation, synthesis, technology, term, transport, FASEB list