The Seafood Innovation Cluster is developing a new tool using artificial intelligence to analyse scientific publications from research in Sea lice.

Photo: Project leader Patricia Apablaza, PhD in fish health Patricia Cognitive search
IBM – Watson program uses cognitive search to review large amounts of research documents, and different from a regular search, learns to look at the documents like human do and to ask questions in human language. It has the strength of looking through the whole corpus at the same time and spot connections in the text which may be hard for humans to catch. We can ask relevant questions (queries) that may be answered reading through the body of the data instead to read every paper separated. IBM – Watson, after guidance and training, makes the readings quicker than ever before and performs the answers giving new insights. IBM – Watson is today in use in medical literature in genomics and cancer studies.

Demonstrator project
Currently one thousand of papers on Sea lice are available in public or private data bases (PUBMED and Web of Science) resulted from research projects globally. The IBM – Watson program can review and analyse these large amounts of research documents from a PDF format after a quick conversion to a proper format. Then a new collection of scientific publications is created, which consists in a group of documents that has been ingested, indexed, and are ready to be queried. In connection with AquaCloud platform, The Seafood Innovation Cluster together with IBM and the Sea Lice Research Centre are developing a demonstrator project with the aim to show the values of the IBM – Watson tool with using standard enrichments of the text and documents on Sea lice. The outcomes may be the existing insights, which can be done lot faster, new or deeper insights not extracted today.

New opportunities
IBM – Watson tool may also be applied to other research publications in fish pathogens impacting fish farming, as salmonid alpha virus, yersinia and flavobacterium. Extensive research is ongoing worldwide on these pathogens resulting in large amounts of papers available in scientific data bases.

New project leader
Patricia Apablaza from The Seafood Innovation Cluster is leading the IBM – Watson Sea lice project. Patricia is veterinarian and has a MSc. with a major in microbiology at the University of Concepción, Chile. She completed later a MSc. in Applied Physiology and recently finished a PhD in fish health at the Fish Diseases Research Group, Department of Biological Sciences (BIO), University of Bergen. Patricia has been also working in connection with aquaculture in Norway in positions at Nofima, MSD and Cermaq.