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Updated: Aug 9, 2025
A Method for 3D Reconstruction and Virtual Reality Analysis of Glial and Neuronal Cells
Published on: September 28, 2019
Automatic identification of scientific publications describing digital reconstructions of neural morphology
Patricia Maraver1,2, Carolina Tecuatl1,2, Giorgio A Ascoli1,2
1Bioengineering Department; College of Engineering and Computing; George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA.
Motivation:
The increasing number of peer-reviewed publications constitutes a challenge for biocuration. For example, NeuroMorpho.Org, a sharing platform for digital reconstructions of neural morphology, must evaluate more than 6000 potentially relevant articles per year to identify data of interest. Here, we describe a tool that uses natural language processing and deep learning to assess the likelihood of a publication to be relevant for the project.
Results:
The tool automatically identifies articles describing digitally reconstructed neural morphologies with high accuracy. Its processing rate of 900 publications per hour is not only amply sufficient to autonomously track new research, but also allowed the successful evaluation of older publications backlogged due to limited human resources. The number of bio-entities found since launching the tool almost doubled while greatly reducing manual labor. The classification tool is open source, configurable, and simple to use, making it extensible to other biocuration projects.
Availability:
https://github.com/Joindbre/TextRelevancy.
Contact:
ascoli@gmu.edu.
Supplementary Information:
Supplementary information, tool installation, and API usage are available at https://docs.joindbre.com.
