RAPID: Understanding the Transmission and Prevention of COVID-19 with Biomedical Knowledge Engineering

  • Funded by National Science Foundation (NSF)
  • Total publications:0 publications

Grant number: unknown

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Key facts

  • Disease

    COVID-19
  • Start & end year

    2020
    2021
  • Known Financial Commitments (USD)

    $199,966
  • Funder

    National Science Foundation (NSF)
  • Principal Investigator

    Fei Wang
  • Research Location

    United States of America
  • Lead Research Institution

    Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University
  • Research Priority Alignment

    N/A
  • Research Category

    13

  • Research Subcategory

    N/A

  • Special Interest Tags

    Data Management and Data Sharing

  • Study Type

    Non-Clinical

  • Clinical Trial Details

    N/A

  • Broad Policy Alignment

    Pending

  • Age Group

    Not Applicable

  • Vulnerable Population

    Not applicable

  • Occupations of Interest

    Not applicable

Abstract

COVID-19 has been a global pandemic affecting millions of people across hundreds of countries. Great
efforts have been devoted to the research on the understanding of the transmission and prevention of
COVID-19. Staying up-to-date with the latest research is crucial to the researchers and practitioners. However, the rapid growing of the number of the relevant literature makes this a challenging task. This project proposes to build a COVID 19 specific knowledge graph to facilitate the acquisition of COVID-19 related knowledge. The knowledge graph will also be continuously updated with the information extracted from latest biomedical literature with natural language processing techniques. A software pipeline that integrates and makes the knowledge graph publicly available as a web service with user friendly interface supporting information retrieval and question answering. Interactive visualization will be provided for the users to explore the knowledge graph and derive the inference paths to obtain the answers. All associated data and source codes for constructing the knowledge graph will be made publicly available.

This project constructs a COVID-19 specific knowledge graph by 1) integrating the existing knowledge
bases on biomedical entities from biological, clinical and epidemiological scales; 2) extracting new
knowledge from latest biomedical literature and enhancing the constructed knowledge graph
continuously. Although the knowledge graph targets COVID-19, the developed pipeline and
techniques can be easily extended to other critical diseases as well. The technical content of the proposed research will impact public health, biomedical informatics, computer science and epidemiology. The results of the proposed research will be incorporated into the classes. Females and underrepresented researchers, undergraduates and K-12 students, will be actively engaged in the research effort of this project.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.