Interpreting medical tables as linked data for generating meta-analysis reports

Evidence-based medicine is the application of current medical evidence to patient care and typically uses quantitative data from research studies. It is increasingly driven by data on the efficacy of drug dosages and the correlations between various medical factors that are assembled and integrated through meta-analyses (i.e., systematic reviews) of data in tables from publications and clinical trial studies. We describe a important component of a system to automatically produce evidence reports that performs two key functions: (i) understanding the meaning of data in medical tables and (ii) identifying and retrieving relevant tables given a input query. We present modifications to our existing framework for inferring the semantics of tables and an ontology developed to model and represent medical tables in RDF. Representing medical tables as RDF makes it easier for the automatic extraction, integration and reuse of data from multiple studies, which is essential for generating meta-analyses reports. We show how relevant tables can be identified by querying over their RDF representations and describe two evaluation experiments: one on mapping medical tables to linked data and another on identifying tables relevant to a retrieval query.