Visualization of Diseases at Risk in the COVID-19 Literature
This tool helps researchers explore disease risks in COVID-19 literature, with potential broader applications to other medical corpora, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The authors tackled the problem of automatically extracting diseases and risk factors from the COVID-19 literature, resulting in a dashboard for visualizing these diseases within a classification hierarchy.
This paper presents a project, named VIDAR-19, able to extract automatically diseases from the CORD-19 dataset, and also diseases which might be considered as risk factors. The project relies on the ICD-11 classification of diseases maintained by the WHO. This nomenclature is used as a data source of the extraction mechanism, and also as the repository for the results. Developed for the COVID-19, the project has the ability to extract diseases at risk and to calculate relevant indicators. The outcome of the project is presented in a dashboard which enables the user to explore graphically diseases at risk which are put back in the classification hierarchy. Beyond the COVID-19, VIDAR has much broader applications and might be directly used for any corpus dealing with other pathologies.