Enhanced Health Study Discoverability: Graph-Based Analysis Approach.

BACKGROUND

Efficiently finding and exploring relevant health studies is critical for informed, evidence-based health care. However, study information remains distributed across multiple resources, hindering interoperability, search, and reuse. Enhancing the findability of study data is a key challenge in promoting the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR) principles in health research.

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to improve the findability and comparability of health studies by developing a semantically enriched graph-based framework that supports intuitive search and exploration for diverse stakeholders, including clinicians, researchers, and patients.

METHODS

We developed the BRAinS-Graph ("Biomedical Knowledge Graph for Recommending and Analysing Health Studies"), a semantically enriched knowledge base that integrates data from ClinicalTrials.gov, the Portal for Medical Data Models, the Unified Medical Language System, and MeSH into a single graph database. The framework applies an extract-transform-load process to integrate heterogeneous data structures and link related information across study resources and biomedical ontologies.

RESULTS

The BRAinS-Graph supports fine-grained, semantic searches across study metadata, eligibility criteria, and structural properties. Use cases illustrate its potential for clinicians, patients, and researchers, including analyses of study type distributions for meta-analyses and the identification of studies relevant to individual patients.

CONCLUSIONS

By integrating heterogeneous study data into one interconnected knowledge base, the BRAinS-Graph improves the findability, accessibility, and reusability of study information. This work establishes a foundation for graph-based study recommendation systems and cross-institutional research infrastructures.