I first blogged about the Memantic paper: Memantic: A Medical Knowledge Discovery Engine in March of this year and am very happy to now find it online!
From the about page:
Memantic captures relationships between medical concepts by mining biomedical literature and organises these relationships visually according to a well-known medical ontology. For example, a search for “Vitamin B12 deficiency” will yield a visual representation of all related diseases, symptoms and other medical entities that Memantic has discovered from the 25 million medical publications and abstracts mentioned above, as well as a number of medical encyclopaedias.
The user can explore a relationship of interest (such as the one between “Vitamin B12 deficiency” and “optic neuropathy”, for instance) by clicking on it, which will bring up links to all the scientific texts that have been discovered to support that relationship. Furthermore, the user can select the desired type of related concepts — such as “diseases”, “symptoms”, “pharmacological agents”, “physiological functions”, and so on — and use it as a filter to make the visualisation even more concise. Finally, the related concepts can be semantically grouped into an expandable tree hierarchy to further reduce screen clutter and to let the user quickly navigate to the relevant area of interest.
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Concisely organising related medical entities without duplication
Memantic first presents all medical terms related to the query concept and then groups publications by the presence of each such term in addition to the query itself. The hierarchical nature of this grouping allows the user to quickly establish previously unencountered relationships and to drill down into the hierarchy to only look at the papers concerning such relationships. Contrast this with the same search performed on Google, where the user normally gets a number of links, many of which have the same title; the user has to go through each link to see if it contains any novel information that is relevant to their query.
Keeping the index of relationships up-to-date
Memantic perpetually renews its index by continuously mining the biomedical literature, extracting new relationships and adding supporting publications to the ones already discovered. The key advantage of Memantic’s user interface is that novel relationships become apparent to the user much quicker than on standard search engines. For example, Google may index a new research paper that exposes a previously unexplored connection between a particular drug and the disease that is being searched for by the user. However, Google may not assign that paper the sufficient weight for it to appear in the first few pages of the search results, thus making it invisible to the people searching for the disease who do not persevere in clicking past those initial pages.
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To get a real feel for what the site is capable of, you need to create an account (free) and try it for yourself.
I am not a professional medical researchers but was able to duplicate some prior research I have done on edge case conditions fairly quickly. Whether that was due to the interface and its techniques or because of my knowledge of the subject area is hard to answer.
The interface alone is worth the visit.
Do give Memantic a spin! I think you will like what you find.