Leveraging GPT-4o for Automated Extraction of Neural Projections from Scientific Literature

Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP) is a major cause of death for epilepsy patients having uncontrolled seizures. Understanding the complex neural circuits within the central nervous system is crucial for understanding the mechanisms underlying cardiorespiratory regulation, particularly in the context of SUDEP. This study explores the potential of GPT-4o, a cutting-edge language model, to automate the extraction of neural projections from scientific literature. We developed prompts to extract neuroscientific structures, extract projections, and perform synonym harmonization. Applying the approach to four neuroscientific articles, the method extracted 205 projections. A random sample of 100 projections identified was handed over to a domain expert for review where 95 were found to be correct. Therefore, GPT-4o was determined to be accurate in parsing complex scientific texts in extracting neural projections. Future work will involve extracting additional entities like techniques and species information for the projections identified.