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I. J. Medical Informatics. 01/2009; 78:579-587.
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I. J. Medical Informatics. 01/2009; 78:638.
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ABSTRACT: Today, the Web is a media with increasing pervasiveness around the world. Its use is constantly growing and the medical field
is no exception. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 80% of Internet users have searched for American medical
information in 2006. However, the problem is no longer about finding information but assessing the credibility of the publishers
as well as the relevance and accuracy of the documents retrieved from the web. This problem is particularly relevant in the
medical area which has a direct impact on the well-being of citizens and in the Web 2.0 context where information publishing
is easier than ever. To address the quality of the medical Internet, the HONcode certification proposed by the Health On the
Net Foundation (HON) is certainly the most successful initiative. The aims of this paper are to present certification activity
through the HONcode experience and to show that certification is more complex than a simple code of conduct. Therefore, we
first present the HONcode, its application and its current evolutions. Following that, we give some quantitative results and
describe how the final user can access the certified information.
KeywordsCertification-Natural Language Processing-Internet-Information Storage and Retrieval-Public Health Informatics
12/2008: pages 313-324;
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ABSTRACT: In this paper, we describe the design and preliminary evaluation of a new type of tools to speed up the encoding of episodes of care using the SNOMED CT terminology.
The proposed system can be used either as a search tool to browse the terminology or as a categorization tool to support automatic annotation of textual contents with SNOMED concepts. The general strategy is similar for both tools and is based on the fusion of two complementary retrieval strategies with thesaural resources. The first classification module uses a traditional vector-space retrieval engine which has been fine-tuned for the task, while the second classifier is based on regular variations of the term list. For evaluating the system, we use a sample of MEDLINE. SNOMED CT categories have been restricted to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) using the SNOMED-MeSH mapping provided by the UMLS (version 2006).
Consistent with previous investigations applied on biomedical terminologies, our results show that performances of the hybrid system are significantly improved as compared to each single module. For top returned concepts, a precision at high ranks (P0) of more than 80% is observed. In addition, a manual and qualitative evaluation on a dozen of MEDLINE abstracts suggests that SNOMED CT could represent an improvement compared to existing medical terminologies such as MeSH.
Although the precision of the SNOMED categorizer seems sufficient to help professional encoders, it is concluded that clinical benchmarks as well as usability studies are needed to assess the impact of our SNOMED encoding method in real settings. AVAILABILITIES: The system is available for research purposes on: http://eagl.unige.ch/SNOCat.
BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 02/2008; 8 Suppl 1:S6. · 1.48 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: The Internet provides a great amount of information and has become one of the communication media which is most widely used [1]. However, the problem is no longer finding information but assessing the credibility of the publishers as well as the relevance and accuracy of the documents retrieved from the web. This problem is particularly relevant in the medical area which has a direct impact on the well-being of citizens. In this paper, we assume that the quality of web pages can be controlled, even when a huge amount of documents has to be reviewed. But this must be supported by both specific automatic tools and human expertise. In this context, we present various initiatives of the Health on the Net Foundation informing the citizens about the reliability of the medical content on the web.
Studies in health technology and informatics 02/2007; 129(Pt 2):1017-21.
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ABSTRACT: The importance of clinical communication between providers, consumers and others, as well as the requisite for computer interoperability, strengthens the need for sharing common accepted terminologies. Under the directives of the World Health Organization (WHO), an approach is currently being conducted in Australia to adopt a standardized terminology for medical procedures that is intended to become an international reference.
In order to achieve such a standard, a collaborative approach is adopted, in line with the successful experiment conducted for the development of the new French coding system CCAM. Different coding centres are involved in setting up a semantic representation of each term using a formal ontological structure expressed through a logic-based representation language. From this language-independent representation, multilingual natural language generation (NLG) is performed to produce noun phrases in various languages that are further compared for consistency with the original terms.
Outcomes are presented for the assessment of the International Classification of Health Interventions (ICHI) and its translation into Portuguese. The initial results clearly emphasize the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of the proposed method for handling both a different classification and an additional language.
NLG tools, based on ontology driven semantic representation, facilitate the discovery of ambiguous and inconsistent terms, and, as such, should be promoted for establishing coherent international terminologies.
Studies in health technology and informatics 02/2007; 129(Pt 1):555-9.
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ABSTRACT: Automatic keyword assignment has been largely studied in medical informatics in the context of the MEDLINE database, both for helping search in MEDLINE and in order to provide an indicative "gist" of the content of an article. Automatic assignment of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), which is formally an automatic text categorization task, has been proposed using different methods or combination of methods, including machine learning (naïve Bayes, neural networks..), linguistically-motivated methods (syntactic parsing, semantic tagging, or information retrieval.
In the present study, we propose to evaluate the impact of the argumentative structures of scientific articles to improve the categorization effectiveness of a categorizer, which combines linguistically-motivated and information retrieval methods. Our argumentative categorizer, which uses representation levels inherited from the field of discourse analysis, is able to classify sentences of an abstract in four classes: PURPOSE; METHODS; RESULTS and CONCLUSION. For the evaluation, the OHSUMED collection, a sample of MEDLINE, is used as a benchmark. For each abstract in the collection, the result of the argumentative classifier, i.e. the labeling of each sentence with an argumentative class, is used to modify the original ranking of the MeSH categorizer.
The most effective combination (+2%, p<0.003) strongly overweights the METHODS section and moderately the RESULTS and CONCLUSION section.
Although modest, the improvement brought by argumentative features for text categorization confirms that discourse analysis methods could benefit text mining in scientific digital libraries.
Studies in health technology and informatics 02/2007; 129(Pt 1):710-5.
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ABSTRACT: To discuss the relationships between ontologies, terminologies and language in the context of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications in order to show the negative consequences of confusing them.
The viewpoints of the terminologist and (computational) linguist are developed separately, and then compared, leading to the presentation of reconciliation among these points of view, with consideration of the role of the ontologist.
In order to encourage appropriate usage of terminologies, guidelines are presented advocating the simultaneous publication of pragmatic vocabularies supported by terminological material based on adequate ontological analysis.
Ontologies, terminologies and natural languages each have their own purpose. Ontologies support machine understanding, natural languages support human communication, and terminologies should form the bridge between them. Therefore, future terminology standards should be based on sound ontology and do justice to the diversities in natural languages. Moreover, they should support local vocabularies, in order to be easily adaptable to local needs and practices.
Studies in health technology and informatics 02/2007; 129(Pt 1):796-801.
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MEDINFO 2007 - Proceedings of the 12th World Congress on Health (Medical) Informatics - Building Sustainable Health Systems, 20-24 August, 2007, Brisbane, Australia; 01/2007
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I. J. Medical Informatics. 01/2007; 76:83.
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MEDINFO 2007 - Proceedings of the 12th World Congress on Health (Medical) Informatics - Building Sustainable Health Systems, 20-24 August, 2007, Brisbane, Australia; 01/2007
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MEDINFO 2007 - Proceedings of the 12th World Congress on Health (Medical) Informatics - Building Sustainable Health Systems, 20-24 August, 2007, Brisbane, Australia; 01/2007
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I. J. Medical Informatics. 01/2007; 76:466-470.
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I. J. Medical Informatics. 01/2007; 76:850-855.
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MEDINFO 2007 - Proceedings of the 12th World Congress on Health (Medical) Informatics - Building Sustainable Health Systems, 20-24 August, 2007, Brisbane, Australia; 01/2007
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MEDINFO 2007 - Proceedings of the 12th World Congress on Health (Medical) Informatics - Building Sustainable Health Systems, 20-24 August, 2007, Brisbane, Australia; 01/2007
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ABSTRACT: (1) to evaluate the performance of emergency department triage; (2) to explore the variability of the triage process; and (3) to examine the reliability of a four-level triage scale, using an interactive triage simulator.
We developed 22 interactive computerized vignettes describing patients presenting at the Emergency Department. Each vignette displayed the presenting complaint and offered the possibility to ask questions and obtain vital signs before deciding on the triage severity rating. The vignettes were rated twice by 45 nurses and 8 physicians.
(1) The concordance between the observed triage decision and an expert-attributed emergency level was perfect in 58% of the situations. Triage acuity was overestimated in 11%, and underestimated in 31%. (2) There was a wide variability in the triage process across observers and vignettes. The mean number of questions varied from 1.77 to 18.95 across individuals, and from 3.96 to 11.60 across vignettes. (3) Finally, the test-retest reliability of our instrument was good (weighted kappa = 0.82) but the interrater reliability was moderate (weighted kappa = 0.41).
The computerized triage simulator is an innovative tool to evaluate the process and the performance of triage and to evaluate the reliability of a triage instrument.
Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 07/2006; 59(6):615-21. · 4.27 Impact Factor
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Ubiquity: Technologies for Better Health in Aging Societies - Proceedings of MIE2006, The XXst International Congress of the European Federation for Medical Informatics, Maastricht, The Netherlands, August 27-30, 2006; 01/2006
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I. J. Medical Informatics. 01/2006; 75:1-3.
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Ubiquity: Technologies for Better Health in Aging Societies - Proceedings of MIE2006, The XXst International Congress of the European Federation for Medical Informatics, Maastricht, The Netherlands, August 27-30, 2006; 01/2006
