SciBite Curation Jamboree for Men’s Health Awareness Month

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SciBite’s VOCabs are named entity recognition (NER)-tuned ontologies that serve as the foundation of our software solutions. Primarily built on public resources for essential domains in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors—from drugs to diseases, from diagnostics to biomarkers—our 180+ VOCabs help our customers standardize their data and efficiently locate relevant literature and documentation for applications in drug discovery, manufacturing, pharmacovigilance, and more.

Last month, SciBite held our inaugural curation “jamboree”, an intensive event focused on enriching and enhancing our VOCabs’ coverage of concepts and terminology relevant to menopause in celebration of World Menopause Day. The event led to the identification of over 200 menopause-related entities and synonyms missing from public ontologies.

Inspired by this success, SciBite staff once again came together on Friday, November 22^nd, this time focusing on prostate and testicular cancer in honour of Movember and Men’s Health Awareness Month. Curation experts in the Ontologies Team were joined by project managers, software developers, product managers, data scientists, and technical consultants, bringing in a diverse range of perspectives and background knowledge.

During the event, we used TERMite, our NER engine, to annotate prostate and testicular cancer-related content ranging from primary literature such as PubMed Central full texts and clinical trial records from CT.gov, to health articles from authorities such as the NHS and the Cleveland Clinic, to LLM-generated reports by ChatGPT.

The session identified over 400 prostate and testicular cancer-related terms: a tremendous success! Next, our curators will review these terms for inclusion in the appropriate VOCabs. As a community service, we will eventually share our recommendations with the organizations that manage the corresponding public ontologies.

We’re excited to announce that more curation jamborees are on the horizon! The series will continue to with key health awareness initiatives, such as Rare Disease Day in February. These jamborees are a fun and impactful way to reaffirm our commitment to improving health data accessibility and understanding. Thank you to everyone involved for your dedication and hard work. Together, we’re making a real difference!

This screenshot illustrates the curation process during the jamboree using selected text from a scientific publication about prostate cancer diagnostics. When a term is annotated by TERMite—such as “prostate-specific antigen” in our genes and proteins VOCab (HGNCGENE: HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee)— that means the content is more “findable” and “accessible” in the language of the FAIR framework. Conversely, unannotated terms such as “PI-RADS” and “clinically significant prostate cancer” are not indexed, limiting their discoverability by search queries on these topics. By adding these terms to our VOCabs, we improve information retrieval, thereby supporting better understanding and research into prostate cancer.

Mark Streer

Scientific Curator (Japanese), SciBite

Mark Streer has served as a Scientific Curator in SciBite’s Ontologies Team since 2021, specializing in Japanese language integration. Leveraging his expertise at the nexus of biomedical research and technical translation, he brings to the table extensive knowledge of English and Japanese scientific terminology, along with enthusiasm for applying cutting-edge ML/AI technologies to ontology curation, software development, and linguistic solutions.

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News SciBite Curation Jamboree for World Menopause Day

Celebrate World Menopause Day as SciBite staff curate menopause-related terms to enhance our vocabularies for improved healthcare solutions.