Abstract

This study aims to infer the gene-protein 'brings_about' chains of pancreatic cancer which were referred to in the pancreatic cancer related researches by constructing the gene-protein interaction network of pancreatic cancer. The chains can help us uncover publicly unknown knowledge that would develop as empirical studies for investigating the cause of pancreatic cancer. In this study, we applied a novel approach that grafts text mining and the main path analysis into Swanson's ABC model for expanding intermediate concepts to multi-levels and extracting the most significant path. We carried out text mining analysis on the full texts of the pancreatic cancer research papers published during the last ten-year period and extracted the gene-protein entities and relations. The 'brings_about' network was established with bio relations represented by bio verbs. We also applied main path analysis to the network. We found the main direct 'brings_about' path of pancreatic cancer which includes 14 nodes and 13 arcs. 9 arcs were confirmed as the actual relations emerged on the related researches while the other 4 arcs were arisen in the network transformation process for main path analysis. We believe that our approach to combining text mining analysis with main path analysis can be a useful tool for inferring undiscovered knowledge in the situation where either a starting or an ending point is unknown.