The SETAC North America 41st Annual Meeting, being held virtually November 15-19, brings together environmental professionals and students engaged in environmental science from around the globe. As part of this meeting, Dr. Brian Howard will present recent work on a web-based literature identification platform for EPA’s ECOTOXicology Knowledgebase (ECOTOX). ECOTOX is a comprehensive, publicly available resource providing single chemical environmental toxicity data on aquatic life, terrestrial plants and wildlife. The ECOTOX database currently contains data for >12,000 chemicals and >13,000 species manually extracted from >50,000 references. The availability of this extensive dataset of historical screening decisions provided by EPA collaborators enabled Sciome to develop high performance, state-of-the-art neural network classifiers to partially automate title and abstract screening and to further categorize rejected references according to predefined exclusion categories. The team has demonstrated that integrating two deep learning models into the SWIFT-Active Screener software resulted in additional benefits beyond the times savings provided by the standard approach, with larger savings for the datasets having the most articles.
Update: Nov 5, 2020. The presentation is available online for those interested in further details.