Stefano Marchesin

Anastasios Nentidis, Georgios Katsimpras, Anastasia Krithara et al.

This is an overview of the thirteenth edition of the BioASQ challenge in the context of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2025. BioASQ is a series of international challenges promoting advances in large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering. This year, BioASQ consisted of new editions of the two established tasks, b and Synergy, and four new tasks: a) Task MultiClinSum on multilingual clinical summarization. b) Task BioNNE-L on nested named entity linking in Russian and English. c) Task ELCardioCC on clinical coding in cardiology. d) Task GutBrainIE on gut-brain interplay information extraction. In this edition of BioASQ, 83 competing teams participated with more than 1000 distinct submissions in total for the six different shared tasks of the challenge. Similar to previous editions, several participating systems achieved competitive performance, indicating the continuous advancement of the state-of-the-art in the field.

Niccolò Marini, Stefano Marchesin, Lluis Borras Ferris et al.

The increasing availability of biomedical data is helping to design more robust deep learning (DL) algorithms to analyze biomedical samples. Currently, one of the main limitations to train DL algorithms to perform a specific task is the need for medical experts to label data. Automatic methods to label data exist, however automatic labels can be noisy and it is not completely clear when automatic labels can be adopted to train DL models. This paper aims to investigate under which circumstances automatic labels can be adopted to train a DL model on the classification of Whole Slide Images (WSI). The analysis involves multiple architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Vision Transformer (ViT), and over 10000 WSIs, collected from three use cases: celiac disease, lung cancer and colon cancer, which one including respectively binary, multiclass and multilabel data. The results allow identifying 10% as the percentage of noisy labels that lead to train competitive models for the classification of WSIs. Therefore, an algorithm generating automatic labels needs to fit this criterion to be adopted. The application of the Semantic Knowledge Extractor Tool (SKET) algorithm to generate automatic labels leads to performance comparable to the one obtained with manual labels, since it generates a percentage of noisy labels between 2-5%. Automatic labels are as effective as manual ones, reaching solid performance comparable to the one obtained training models with manual labels.

Maristella Agosti, Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, Stefano Marchesin et al.

In this paper, we investigate how semantic relations between concepts extracted from medical documents can be employed to improve the retrieval of medical literature. Semantic relations explicitly represent relatedness between concepts and carry high informative power that can be leveraged to improve the effectiveness of retrieval functionalities of clinical decision support systems. We present preliminary results and show how relations are able to provide a sizable increase of the precision for several topics, albeit having no impact on others. We then discuss some future directions to minimize the impact of negative results while maximizing the impact of good results.

Stefano Marchesin

The goal of case-based retrieval is to assist physicians in the clinical decision making process, by finding relevant medical literature in large archives. We propose a research that aims at improving the effectiveness of case-based retrieval systems through the use of automatically created document-level semantic networks. The proposed research tackles different aspects of information systems and leverages the recent advancements in information extraction and relational learning to revisit and advance the core ideas of concept-centered hypertext models. We propose a two-step methodology that in the first step addresses the automatic creation of document-level semantic networks, then in the second step it designs methods that exploit such document representations to retrieve relevant cases from medical literature. For the automatic creation of documents' semantic networks, we design a combination of information extraction techniques and relational learning models. Mining concepts and relations from text, information extraction techniques represent the core of the document-level semantic networks' building process. On the other hand, relational learning models have the task of enriching the graph with additional connections that have not been detected by information extraction algorithms and strengthening the confidence score of extracted relations. For the retrieval of relevant medical literature, we investigate methods that are capable of comparing the documents' semantic networks in terms of structure and semantics. The automatic extraction of semantic relations from documents, and their centrality in the creation of the documents' semantic networks, represent our attempt to go one step further than previous graph-based approaches.