Toxic effects of nanomaterials for health applications: how automation can support a systematic review of the literature?

Systematic reviews of the scientific literature can be an important source of information supporting the daily work of the regulators in their decision making, particularly in areas of innovative technologies where the regulatory experience is still limited. Significant research activities in the field of nanotechnology resulted in a huge number of publications in the last decades. However, even if the published data can provide relevant information, scientific articles are often of divers quality and it is nearly impossible to manually process and evaluate such amount of data in a systematic manner. In this feasibility study we investigated to what extend open access automation tools can support a systematic review of toxicity effects of nanomaterials for health applications reported in the scientific literature. Following the steps of a systematic review, we used a battery of available tools to perform the initial steps of the review such as targeted searches, data curation and abstract screening. However, for more specific tasks such as evaluation of the article quality as well as the extraction of particular information, no ready-to-use tools are available for the moment. Our in-house developed segmentation tool allowed us to extract specific sections of the articles such as the Materials and Methods part or the Results section where subsequent text analysis has been performed. We ranked the articles according to quality criteria based on the reported nanomaterial characterisation and extracted most frequently described toxicity effects induced by different types of nanomaterials. Even if further demonstration of the reliability and applicability of automation tools is necessary, this study demonstrated the potential to leverage information from the scientific literature by using automation systems in a tiered strategy.

HALAMODA KENZAOUI Blanka;  ROLLAND Etienne;  PIOVESAN Jacopo;  PUERTAS GALLARDO Antonio;  BREMER Susanne; 

2021-12-14

WILEY

JRC124228

0260-437X (online),   

https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jat.4204,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC124228,   

10.1002/jat.4204 (online),