Department of Computer Science, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858 and Department of Physiology, Brody School of Medicine, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27834, USA.
Bioinformatics. 2013 Mar 1;29(5):638-44. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btt014. Epub 2013 Jan 16.
Research interests in microRNAs have increased rapidly in the past decade. Many studies have showed that microRNAs have close relationships with various human cancers, and they potentially could be used as cancer indicators in diagnosis or as a suppressor for treatment purposes. There are several databases that contain microRNA-cancer associations predicted by computational methods but few from empirical results. Despite the fact that abundant experiments investigating microRNA expressions in cancer cells have been carried out, the results have remain scattered in the literature. We propose to extract microRNA-cancer associations by text mining and store them in a database called miRCancer.
The text mining is based on 75 rules we have constructed, which represent the common sentence structures typically used to state microRNA expressions in cancers. The microRNA-cancer association database, miRCancer, is updated regularly by running the text mining algorithm against PubMed. All miRNA-cancer associations are confirmed manually after automatic extraction. miRCancer currently documents 878 relationships between 236 microRNAs and 79 human cancers through the processing of >26 000 published articles.
miRCancer is freely available on the web at http://mircancer.ecu.edu/
在过去的十年中，人们对 microRNAs 的研究兴趣迅速增加。许多研究表明，microRNAs 与各种人类癌症密切相关，它们有可能被用作诊断中的癌症指标，或作为治疗目的的抑制剂。有几个数据库包含通过计算方法预测的 microRNA-癌症关联，但很少有来自经验结果的。尽管已经进行了大量研究癌症细胞中 microRNA 表达的实验，但结果仍然分散在文献中。我们建议通过文本挖掘提取 microRNA-癌症关联，并将其存储在一个名为 miRCancer 的数据库中。
文本挖掘基于我们构建的 75 条规则，这些规则代表了通常用于陈述癌症中 microRNA 表达的常见句子结构。microRNA-癌症关联数据库 miRCancer 通过针对 PubMed 运行文本挖掘算法定期更新。所有 miRNA-癌症关联在自动提取后都经过人工确认。miRCancer 通过处理超过 26000 篇已发表的文章，目前记录了 236 个 microRNAs 与 79 种人类癌症之间的 878 种关系。
miRCancer 可在 http://mircancer.ecu.edu/ 上免费获得。
