Authors:
(1) Jinge Wang, Department of Microbiology, Immunology & Cell Biology, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA;
(2) Zien Cheng, Department of Microbiology, Immunology & Cell Biology, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA;
(3) Qiuming Yao, School of Computing, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA;
(4) Li Liu, College of Health Solutions, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ 85004, USA and Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA;
(5) Dong Xu, Department of Electrical Engineer and Computer Science, Christopher S. Bond Life Sciences Center, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA;
(6) Gangqing Hu, Department of Microbiology, Immunology & Cell Biology, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA ([email protected]).
Table of Links
4. Biomedical Text Mining and 4.1. Performance Assessments across typical tasks
4.2. Biological pathway mining
5.1. Human-in-the-Loop and 5.2. In-context Learning
6. Biomedical Image Understanding
7.1 Application in Applied Bioinformatics
7.2. Biomedical Database Access
7.2. Online tools for Coding with ChatGPT
7.4 Benchmarks for Bioinformatics Coding
8. Chatbots in Bioinformatics Education
9. Discussion and Future Perspectives
ABSTRACT
The year 2023 marked a significant surge in the exploration of applying large language model (LLM) chatbots, notably ChatGPT, across various disciplines. We surveyed the applications of ChatGPT in various sectors of bioinformatics and biomedical informatics throughout the year, covering omics, genetics, biomedical text mining, drug discovery, biomedical image understanding, bioinformatics programming, and bioinformatics education. Our survey delineates the current strengths and limitations of this chatbot in bioinformatics and offers insights into potential avenues for future development.
1. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted tremendous interest across various disciplines, emerging as an innovative approach to tackling scientific challenges[1]. The surge in data generated from both public and private sectors, combined with the rapid advancement in AI technologies, has facilitated the development of innovative AI-based solutions and accelerated scientific discoveries[1-3]. The launch of the Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) to the public towards the end of 2022 marked a new era in AI. The biomedical research community embraces this new tool with immense enthusiasm. In 2023 alone, at least 2,074 manuscripts were indexed in PubMed when searching with the keyword "ChatGPT". These studies demonstrate that ChatGPT and similar models have great potential to transform many aspects of education, biomedical research, and clinical practices[4-7].
The core of ChatGPT is a large-language model (LLM) trained on a vast corpus of text data from the internet, including biomedical literature and code[8]. Its ability to comprehend and respond in natural language positions ChatGPT as a valuable tool for biomedical text-based inquiry[9]. Particularly noteworthy is its potential in assisting bioinformatics analysis, enabling scientists to conduct data analyses via verbal instructions[10-12]. Surprisingly, a search on PubMed using the keywords "ChatGPT" and "bioinformatics" returned only 30 publications. While this number could have been underestimated by limiting the search to PubMed, and a few hundred related articles are probably archived as preprints or under review, it still suggests that the application of this innovative tool in bioinformatics is relatively underexplored compared to other areas of biomedical research.
In this review, we summarize recent advancements, predominantly within 2023, in the application of ChatGPT across a broad spectrum of bioinformatics and biomedical informatics topics, including omics, genetics, biomedical text mining, drug discovery, biomedical images, bioinformatics programming, and bioinformatics education (Figure 1). As the topics are relatively new, this survey included not only publications in journals but also preprints in various archive platforms. Our objective is to encapsulate recurring themes from independent works within the same topic or across multiple topics, pinpointing prospective avenues for further exploration. Additionally, this review allows us to identify challenges in integrating chatbots into bioinformatics, such as inefficiency in prompt generation, uncertainty in responses, and concerns over data privacy[13-15]. The insights from this analysis are anticipated to benefit other domains where the integration of chatbot technology is actively pursued.
This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.