Text mining holds great potential for the medical field in general and biomedicine in particular for several reasons.
First , the published literature and publication outlets (especially with the advent of the open source journals) in the field are expanding at an exponential rate.
Second, compared to most other fields, the medical literature is more standardized and orderly, making it a more “minable” information source.
Finally, the terminology used in this literature is relatively constant, having a fairly standardized ontology. What follows are a few exemplary studies where text mining techniques were successfully used in extracting novel patterns from biomedical literature.
Knowing the location of a protein within a cell can help to elucidate its role in biological processes and to determine its potential as a drug target.