Literature mining on pharmacokinetics numerical data: a feasibility study

A feasibility study of literature mining is conducted on drug PK parameter numerical data with a sequential mining strategy. Firstly, an entity template library is built to retrieve pharmacokinetics relevant articles. Then a set of tagging and extraction rules are applied to retrieve PK data from the article abstracts. To estimate the PK parameter population-average mean and between-study variance, a linear mixed meta-analysis model and an E-M algorithm are developed to describe the probability distributions of PK parameters. Finally, a cross-validation procedure is developed to ascertain false-positive mining results. Using this approach to mine midazolam (MDZ) PK data, an 88% precision rate and 92% recall rate are achieved, with an F-score=90%. It greatly out-performs a conventional data mining approach (support vector machine), which has an F-score of 68.1%. Further investigate on 7 more drugs reveals comparable performances of our sequential mining approach.