MeSH on Demand:
Finding MeSH Terms in Your Text.
In this tutorial,
we will show how to process a biomedical text
using the MeSH on Demand tool
to identify terms in the text
that are also in the
National Library of Medicine
Medical Subject Headings vocabulary,
also known as MeSH.
This tool was developed and produced at the
United States National Library of Medicine (NLM).
It is an application of the Medical Text Indexer system,
or MTI, that is used at NLM to
generate indexing suggestions
from the Medical Subject Headings vocabulary.
MeSH on Demand enables you to
create your own set of MeSH terms for any text,
such as an article you are writing
or any other free text. Additionally,
with MeSH on Demand you can perform
PubMed searches based on your customized
set of MeSH terms.
Once you are on the tool’s home page,
you’ll see an empty text box in the middle of the screen.
This is where you will enter
the text to be analyzed.
Above the text box are
2 functional buttons:
Search, to submit your text for processing,
and Reset, to clear the text box and results
of the preceding search.
Before entering your text in the box,
make sure it is in English.
All formatting, punctuation,
and non-English characters
will be removed during the pre-processing
of your text, before it is processed by MTI.
Remove all special characters and convert
non-English characters to their English equivalents.
This will assure the tool will produce
higher quality output.
For example, the accented words
“déjà vu” should be converted
to English only “d-e-j-a[space]v-u".
Greek letters can be converted
to their transliterated English versions.
After your text is converted to English
enter or paste it into the Search text box.
Then click the Search button to submit your text for analysis
and allow time for processing.
The longer the text the longer it will take to process.
The input size of text is
currently limited to 10,000 characters.
Once the processing is complete,
the output shows your processed text.
Some of the words will be highlighted
and underscored.
Those are the words that MTI identified
as a match to the MeSH vocabulary.
To the right of the text box,
you will see the list of terms from
the MeSH vocabulary that were identified in the text.
In some cases, you will also see another list
below the identified terms
that are additional MeSH terms
that are not derived directly from the text.
These are additional terms suggested
by MTI that serve to provide an
expanded set of relevant MeSH concepts.
When you hover the mouse pointer over a MeSH term
in the list the text of the corresponding word,
or words, in the text box will turn red.
Also, when you hover over a highlighted word
in the text box, the corresponding
MeSH term from the list will turn red.
Note that each MeSH term in the list
has a letter “i” next to it, on the left.
Hovering over that letter “i” displays the
information in the Scope Note from that MeSH record.
Clicking on a MeSH term itself
will take you to a new tab
showing all the details of that MeSH record as
displayed in the MeSH Browser.
Scroll down to below the text box
to see the PubMed/Medline Similar Articles section.
Here there will be a list of
the top 10 articles from PubMed
that are most similar to the set of MeSH terms that
were identified in your text.
You can click on the PubMed ID of the article
to open its PubMed record in a new tab.
“Start PubMed Search” button allows you to
perform customized PubMed searches.
We will describe this functionality
in a separate tutorial.
The button just below is
“Export Data”.
Clicking on this button
will save your results to a text file.
The text file will contain the list of identified MeSH terms
followed by additional Relevant MeSH terms,
the top 10 PubMed citations,
and your input text.
This concludes our tutorial.
For further help and more details
on the functionality of MeSH on Demand,
please review information available
on Help/FAQ and Feature pages.
To contact us, click on the Contact Us link
on the upper right.
Thank you for watching!