Genetic Databases > Bioinformatics Support

BITOLA - Biomedical Discovery Support System: www.mf.uni-lj.si/bitola/

BITOLA is an interactive literature-based biomedical discovery support system. The purpose of the system is to help biomedical researchers make new discoveries by finding potentially new relationships between biomedical concepts. The set of concepts currently contains MeSH terms (Medical Subject Heading), which is used to index Medline, and around 22000 human genes from HUGO and LocusLink. The potentially new relationships are discovered by mining the Medline database (currently around 11000000 citations from 1966 to the end of 2001). 

To make the system more suitable for disease candidate-gene discovery and to decrease the number of candidate relationships, we integrated background knowledge about the chromosomal location of the initial disease as well as the chromosomal location of the candidate genes from resources such as LocusLink, HUGO and OMIM. The BITOLA system can also be used as an alternative way of searching the Medline database.

The system is currently free for everyone. Start the sytem here.

To understand the details of the system and see some examples of its use, you are strongly recommended to read the publications listed below.

Publications:

1. Hristovski D, Peterlin B, Mitchell JA, Humphrey SM. 
   Improving literature based discovery support by genetic knowledge integration. (pdf file)
   Stud Health Technol Inform 2003; 95 68-73.
2. Dimitar Hristovski, Borut Peterlin, Sašo Džeroski, Janez Stare.
   Literature Based Discovery Support System and its Application to Disease Gene Identification.(pdf file)
   Book chapter in print describing in detail an earlier version of the system.
3. Hristovski D, Stare J, Peterlin B, Dzeroski S.
   Supporting discovery in medicine by association rule mining in Medline and UMLS. (pdf file)Medinfo. 2001;10(Pt 2):1344-8.