Background Gastrointestinal microbiome has drawn an increasing amount of attention over the past decades. There is emerging evidence that the gut flora plays a major role in the pathogenesis of certain diseases. We aimed to analyze the evolution of gastrointestinal microbiome research and evaluate publications qualitatively and quantitatively. Methods We obtained a record of 2891 manuscripts published between 1998 and 2018 from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) of Thomson Reuters; this record was obtained on June 23, 2018. The WoSCC is the most frequently used source of scientific information. We used the term “Gastrointestinal Microbiomes” and all of its hyponyms to retrieve the record, and restricted the subjects to gastroenterology and hepatology. We then derived a clustered network from 70,169 references that were cited by the 2891 manuscripts, and identified 676 top co-cited articles. Next, we used the bibliometric method, CiteSpace V, and VOSviewer 1.6.8 to identify top authors, journals, institutions, countries, keywords, co-cited articles, and trends. Results We identified that the number of publications on gastrointestinal microbiome is increasing over time. 112 journals published articles on gastrointestinal microbiome. The United States of America was the leading country for publications, and the leading institution was the University of North Carolina. Co-cited reference analysis revealed the top landmark articles in the field. Gut microbiota, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), probiotics, irritable bowel disease, and obesity are some of the high frequency keywords in co-occurrence cluster analysis and co-cited reference cluster analysis; indicating gut microbiota and related digestive diseases remain the hotspots in gut microbiome research. Burst detection analysis of top keywords showed that bile acid, obesity, and Akkermansia muciniphila were the new research foci. Conclusions This study revealed that our understanding of the link between gastrointestinal microbiome and associated diseases has evolved dramatically over time. The emerging new therapeutic targets in gut microbiota would be the foci of future research.

In this paper, we make a move to build a dialogue system for automatic diagnosis. We first build a dataset collected from an online medical forum by extracting symptoms from both patients' self-reports and conversational data between patients and doctors. Then we propose a taskoriented dialogue system framework to make the diagnosis for patients automatically, which can converse with patients to collect additional symptoms beyond their self-reports. Experimental results on our dataset show that additional symptoms extracted from conversation can greatly improve the accuracy for disease identification and our dialogue system is able to collect these symptoms automatically and make a better diagnosis.

TIF is an alternative intervention in controlling GERD-related symptoms with comparable short-term patient satisfaction. Long-term results showed decreased efficacy with time. Patients often resume PPIs at reduced doses in the near future.