ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVES: The increasing amount of electronically available documents in bibliographic databases and the clinical documentation requires user-friendly techniques for content retrieval. METHODS: A domain-specific approach on semantic text indexing for document retrieval is presented. It is based on a subword thesaurus and maps the content of texts in different European languages to a common interlingual representation, which supports the search across multilingual document collections. RESULTS: Three use cases are presented where the semantic retrieval method has been implemented: a bibliographic database, a department EHR system, and a consumer-oriented Web portal. CONCLUSIONS: It could be shown that a semantic indexing and retrieval approach, the performance of which had already been empirically assessed in prior studies, proved useful in different prototypical and routine scenarios and was well accepted by several user groups.
Subject(s)
Information Storage and Retrieval/methods , Multilingualism , Semantics , Databases, Bibliographic , Europe , Medical InformaticsABSTRACT
PURPOSE: Since 2003 the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) has been developing a lexicon of standardized radiological terms (RadLex) intended to support the structured reporting of imaging observations and the indexing of teaching cases. The aim of this study was to translate the first version of the lexicon (1 - 2007) into German and to implement a language-independent online term browser. MATERIALS AND METHODS: RadLex version 1 - 2007 contains 6303 terms in nine main categories. Two radiologists independently translated the lexicon using medical dictionaries. Terms translated differently were revised and translated by consensus. For the development of an online term browser, a text processing algorithm called morphosemantic indexing was used which splits up words into small semantic units and compares those units to language-specific subword thesauri. RESULTS: In total 6240 of 6303 terms (99 %) were translated. Of those terms 3965 were German, 1893 were Latin, 359 were multilingual, and 23 were English terms that are also used in German and were therefore maintained. The online term browser supports a language-independent term search in RadLex (German/English) and other common medical terminology (e. g., ICD 10). The term browser displays term hierarchies and translations in different frames and the complexity of the result lists can be adapted by the user. CONCLUSION: RadLex version 1 - 2007 developed by the RSNA is now available in German and can be accessed online through a term browser with an efficient search function. This is an important precondition for the future comparison of national and international indexed radiological examination results and the interoperability between digital teaching resources.
