PheneBank: a literature-based database of phenotypes

Abstract

Motivation: Significant effort has been spent by curators to create coding systems for phenotypes such as the Human Phenotype Ontology, as well as disease-phenotype annotations. We aim to support the discovery of literature-based phenotypes and integrate them into the knowledge discovery process.

Results: PheneBank is a Web-portal for retrieving human phenotype-disease associations that have been text-mined from the whole of Medline. Our approach exploits state-of-the-art machine learning for concept identification by utilizing an expert annotated rare disease corpus from the PMC Text Mining subset. Evaluation of the system for entities is conducted on a gold-standard corpus of rare disease sentences and for associations against the Monarch initiative data.

Availability and implementation: The PheneBank Web-portal freely available at http://www.phenebank.org. Annotated Medline data is available from Zenodo at DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1408800. Semantic annotation software is freely available for non-commercial use at GitHub: https://github.com/pilehvar/phenebank.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Fig. 1.

Overview of the PheneBank system