Evaluation of a prototype machine learning tool to semi-automate data extraction for systematic literature reviews

BACKGROUND: Evidence-based medicine requires synthesis of research through rigorous and time-intensive systematic literature reviews (SLRs), with significant resource expenditure for data extraction from scientific publications. Machine learning may enable the timely completion of SLRs and reduce errors by automating data identification and extraction. METHODS: We evaluated the use of machine learning to extract data from publications related to SLRs in oncology (SLR 1) and Fabry disease (SLR 2). SLR 1 predominantly contained interventional studies and SLR 2 observational studies. Predefined key terms and data were manually annotated to train and test bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) and bidirectional long-short-term memory machine learning models. Using human annotation as a reference, we assessed the ability of the models to identify biomedical terms of interest (entities) and their relations. We also pretrained BERT on a corpus of 100,000 open access clinical publications and/or enhanced context-dependent entity classification with a conditional random field (CRF) model. Performance was measured using the F(1) score, a metric that combines precision and recall. We defined successful matches as partial overlap of entities of the same type. RESULTS: For entity recognition, the pretrained BERT+CRF model had the best performance, with an F(1) score of 73% in SLR 1 and 70% in SLR 2. Entity types identified with the highest accuracy were metrics for progression-free survival (SLR 1, F(1) score 88%) or for patient age (SLR 2, F(1) score 82%). Treatment arm dosage was identified less successfully (F(1) scores 60% [SLR 1] and 49% [SLR 2]). The best-performing model for relation extraction, pretrained BERT relation classification, exhibited F(1) scores higher than 90% in cases with at least 80 relation examples for a pair of related entity types. CONCLUSIONS: The performance of BERT is enhanced by pretraining with biomedical literature and by combining with a CRF model. With refinement, machine learning may assist with manual data extraction for SLRs. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13643-023-02351-w.