PUBMED includes more than 18 million journal records covering life sciences and biomedical research literature. The coverage dates back from 1950s and is well known to healthcare and biomedical researchers globally.

The MEDLINE abstracts downloadable from PUBMED, like any journal abstract (and unlike patents), are non-deceptive and represent a clear summary of the contents of the journal article. For technology research and mining analyzing journals abstracts is sufficient instead of full-text journal analysis.

When searching PUBMED a common frustration is the high number of results that make it difficult to narrow down to a particular area of interest. Further, getting technology trend-related answers quickly is another key challenge.

Patent iNSIGHT Pro does a highly efficient job when mining journal abstracts sourced from almost all popular journal databases including PUBMED. Recently we decided to run a test to see as to how quickly and efficiently one can find answers to simple and advanced questions in a practical case-study.

For the test we took all the records related to use of a drug – Tacrolimus in organ transplantations. The drug (as per Wikipedia)  is an immunosuppressive drug that works to reduce the activity of the patient’s immune system and thereby lower the risk of organ rejection after an organ transplant operations. These organ transplants can cover liver, kidney, heart, small bowel, pancreas, lung, trachea, skin, cornea, bone marrow, and limb transplants.

So we pulled up all the PUBMED records related to the use of Tacrolimus in transplant operations (8138 records) and analysed the set in Patent iNSIGHT Pro to find answers to the following questions:

• What trends are seen across different transplants using the drug
• Who are the key research organizations, key researchers and their focus areas
• What are the emerging new areas in the space
• What side effects have been attributed to the use of the drug
• How are the side effects correlated across different transplant operations

We recorded the whole case study right from searching on PUBMED to getting these answers in a video. The codec required to view the video can be downloaded from here and you can download the case study video from here > Rapid Pubmed Analysis.wmv .

A few of the analysis outputs generated from the test are shown below:

Normally getting answers to some of the questions listed above would take days. As is evident from the video, using Patent iNSIGHT Pro we were able to find answers to these questions and generate the outputs all in about 30 minutes !