PhenCards: a data resource linking human phenotype information to biomedical knowledge

Overview of the Knowledge Management Center for Illuminating the Druggable Genome

The Knowledge Management Center (KMC) for the Illuminating the Druggable Genome (IDG) project aims to aggregate, update, and articulate protein-centric data knowledge for the entire human proteome, with emphasis on the understudied proteins from the three IDG protein families. KMC collates and analyzes data from over 70 resources to compile the Target Central Resource Database (TCRD), which is the web-based informatics platform (Pharos). These data include experimental, computational, and text-mined information on protein structures, compound interactions, and disease and phenotype associations. Based on this knowledge, proteins are classified into different Target Development Levels (TDLs) for identification of understudied targets. Additional work by the KMC focuses on enriching target knowledge and producing DrugCentral and other data visualization tools for expanding investigation of understudied targets.

Enhancing phenotype recognition in clinical notes using large language models: PhenoBCBERT and PhenoGPT

To enhance phenotype recognition in clinical notes of genetic diseases, we developed two models-PhenoBCBERT and PhenoGPT-for expanding the vocabularies of Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) terms. While HPO offers a standardized vocabulary for phenotypes, existing tools often fail to capture the full scope of phenotypes due to limitations from traditional heuristic or rule-based approaches. Our models leverage large language models to automate the detection of phenotype terms, including those not in the current HPO. We compare these models with PhenoTagger, another HPO recognition tool, and found that our models identify a wider range of phenotype concepts, including previously uncharacterized ones. Our models also show strong performance in case studies on biomedical literature. We evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of BERT- and GPT-based models in aspects such as architecture and accuracy. Overall, our models enhance automated phenotype detection from clinical texts, improving downstream analyses on human diseases.

Enhancing Phenotype Recognition in Clinical Notes Using Large Language Models: PhenoBCBERT and PhenoGPT

To enhance phenotype recognition in clinical notes of genetic diseases, we developed two models - PhenoBCBERT and PhenoGPT - for expanding the vocabularies of Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) terms. While HPO offers a standardized vocabulary for phenotypes, existing tools often fail to capture the full scope of phenotypes, due to limitations from traditional heuristic or rule-based approaches. Our models leverage large language models (LLMs) to automate the detection of phenotype terms, including those not in the current HPO. We compared these models to PhenoTagger, another HPO recognition tool, and found that our models identify a wider range of phenotype concepts, including previously uncharacterized ones. Our models also showed strong performance in case studies on biomedical literature. We evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of BERT-based and GPT-based models in aspects such as architecture and accuracy. Overall, our models enhance automated phenotype detection from clinical texts, improving downstream analyses on human diseases.

DrugCentral 2023 extends human clinical data and integrates veterinary drugs

DrugCentral monitors new drug approvals and standardizes drug information. The current update contains 285 drugs (131 for human use). New additions include: (i) the integration of veterinary drugs (154 for animal use only), (ii) the addition of 66 documented off-label uses and iii) the identification of adverse drug events from pharmacovigilance data for pediatric and geriatric patients. Additional enhancements include chemical substructure searching using SMILES and 'Target Cards' based on UniProt accession codes. Statistics of interests include the following: (i) 60% of the covered drugs are on-market drugs with expired patent and exclusivity coverage, 17% are off-market, and 23% are on-market drugs with active patents and exclusivity coverage; (ii) 59% of the drugs are oral, 33% are parenteral and 18% topical, at the level of the active ingredients; (iii) only 3% of all drugs are for animal use only; however, 61% of the veterinary drugs are also approved for human use; (iv) dogs, cats and horses are by far the most represented target species for veterinary drugs; (v) the physicochemical property profile of animal drugs is very similar to that of human drugs. Use cases include azaperone, the only sedative approved for swine, and ruxolitinib, a Janus kinase inhibitor.

Termviewer - A Web Application for Streamlined Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) Tagging and Document Annotation

Clinical notes from electronic health records (EHRs) contain a large amount of clinical phenotype data on patients that can provide insights into the phenotypic presentation of various diseases. A number of Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms have been utilized in the past few years to annotate medical concepts, such as Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) terms, from clinical notes. However, efficient use of NLP algorithms requires the use of high-quality clinical notes with phenotype descriptions, and erroneous annotations often exist in results from these NLP algorithms. Manual review by human experts is often needed to compile the correct phenotype information on individual patients. Here we develop TermViewer, a web application that allows multi-party collaborative annotation and quality assessment of clinical notes that have already been processed and tagged by NLP algorithms. TermViewer allows users to view clinical notes with HPO terms highlighted, and to easily classify high-quality notes and revise incorrect tagging of HPO terms. Currently, TermViewer combines MetaMap and cTAKES, two of the most widely used NLP tools for tagging medical terms, and identifies where these two tools agree and disagree, allowing users to perform collaborative manual reviews of computationally generated HPO annotations. TermViewer can be a stand-alone tool for analyzing notes or become part of a machine-learning pipeline where tagged HPO terms can be used as additional input data. TermViewer is available at https://github.com/WGLab/TermViewer.

Clinical Phenotypic Spectrum of 4095 Individuals with Down Syndrome from Text Mining of Electronic Health Records

Human genetic disorders, such as Down syndrome, have a wide variety of clinical phenotypic presentations, and characterizing each nuanced phenotype and subtype can be difficult. In this study, we examined the electronic health records of 4095 individuals with Down syndrome at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to create a method to characterize the phenotypic spectrum digitally. We extracted Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) terms from quality-filtered patient notes using a natural language processing (NLP) approach MetaMap. We catalogued the most common HPO terms related to Down syndrome patients and compared the terms with those from a baseline population. We characterized the top 100 HPO terms by their frequencies at different ages of clinical visits and highlighted selected terms that have time-dependent distributions. We also discovered phenotypic terms that have not been significantly associated with Down syndrome, such as “Proptosis”, “Downslanted palpebral fissures”, and “Microtia”. In summary, our study demonstrated that the clinical phenotypic spectrum of individual with Mendelian diseases can be characterized through NLP-based digital phenotyping on population-scale electronic health records (EHRs).