Improving information retrieval with multiple health terminologies in a quality-controlled gateway.

BACKGROUND: The Catalog and Index of French-language Health Internet resources (CISMeF) is a quality-controlled health gateway, primarily for Web resources in French (n=89,751). Recently, we achieved a major improvement in the structure of the catalogue by setting-up multiple terminologies, based on twelve health terminologies available in French, to overcome the potential weakness of the MeSH thesaurus, which is the main and pivotal terminology we use for indexing and retrieval since 1995. The main aim of this study was to estimate the added-value of exploiting several terminologies and their semantic relationships to improve Web resource indexing and retrieval in CISMeF, in order to provide additional health resources which meet the users' expectations. METHODS: Twelve terminologies were integrated into the CISMeF information system to set up multiple-terminologies indexing and retrieval. The same sets of thirty queries were run: (i) by exploiting the hierarchical structure of the MeSH, and (ii) by exploiting the additional twelve terminologies and their semantic links. The two search modes were evaluated and compared. RESULTS: The overall coverage of the multiple-terminologies search mode was improved by comparison to the coverage of using the MeSH (16,283 vs. 14,159) (+15%). These additional findings were estimated at 56.6% relevant results, 24.7% intermediate results and 18.7% irrelevant. CONCLUSION: The multiple-terminologies approach improved information retrieval. These results suggest that integrating additional health terminologies was able to improve recall. Since performing the study, 21 other terminologies have been added which should enable us to make broader studies in multiple-terminologies information retrieval.

Mapping the ATC classification to the UMLS metathesaurus: some pragmatic applications.

ATC classification is a WHO international classification used to classify drugs. The aim of this paper is to evaluate two lexical methods in English and in French to map ATC to UMLS. Several applications have been impemented to illustrate the use of the ATC mapping in English and French: (a) MeSH translation in Norwegian, (b) Drug Information Portal, and (c) ATC to PubMed tool. Two lexical methods were used to map ATC to UMLS. The first approach used a French natural language processing tool to map French terms of ATC to the French terminologies of UMLS. The second approach used the MetaMap tool to map English terms of ATC to UMLS. The English MetaMap provides slightly more mappings than the French NLP tool (3,170 vs. 2,992). On the other hand, the French NLP tool provides a slightly better precision than MetaMap (88% vs. 86%). Using a manual mapping between ATC and MeSH, the union of the validated mappings between ATC and MeSH provides 2,824 mappings (68.7% of ATC codes of the fifth level). Lexical methods are powerful methods to map health terminologies to the UMLS Metathesaurus. Manual mapping is still necessary to complete the mapping.

Evaluation of a French medical multi-terminology indexer for the manual annotation of natural language medical reports of healthcare-associated infections.

BACKGROUND: Surveillance of healthcare-associated infections is essential to prevention. A new collaborative project, namely ALADIN, was launched in January 2009 and aims to develop an automated detection tool based on natural language processing of medical documents. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to evaluate the annotation of natural language medical reports of healthcare-associated infections. METHODS: A software MS Access application (NosIndex) has been developed to interface ECMT XML answer and manual annotation work. ECMT performances were evaluated by an infection control practitioner (ICP). Precision was evaluated for the 2 modules and recall only for the default module. Exclusion rate was defined as ratio between medical terms not found by ECMT and total number of terms evaluated. RESULTS: The medical discharge summaries were randomly selected in 4 medical wards. From the 247 medical terms evaluated, ECMT proposed 428 and 3,721 codes, respectively for the default and expansion modules. The precision was higher with the default module (P1=0.62) than with the expansion (P2=0.47). CONCLUSION: Performances of ECMT as support tool for the medical annotation were satisfactory.

Can F-MTI semantic-mined drug codes be used for adverse drug events detection when no CPOE is available?

BACKGROUND: Adverse Drug Events (ADEs) endanger the patients. Their detection and prevention is essential to improve the patients' safety. In the absence of computerized physician order entry (CPOE), discharge summaries are the only source of information about the drugs prescribed during a hospitalization. The French Multierminology Indexer (F-MTI) can help to extract drug-related information from those records. METHODS: In first and second validation steps, the performance of the F-MTI tool is evaluated to extract ICD10 and ATC codes from free-text documents. In third step, potential ADE detection rules are used and the confidences of those rules are compared in several hospitals: using a CPOE vs. using semantic mining of free-text documents, diagnoses and lab results being available in both cases. RESULTS: The F-MTI tool is able to extract ATC codes from documents. Moreover, the evaluation shows coherent and comparable results between the hospitals with CPOEs and the hospital with drugs information extracted from the reports for potential ADE detection. CONCLUSION: semantic mining using F-MTI can help to identify previous cases of potential ADEs in absence of CPOE.

Secondary use of clinical data.

Clinicians involved in clinical care generate daily volumes of important data. This data is important for continuity of care, referrals to specialists and back to the patient's medical home. The same data can be used to generate alerts to improve the practice and to generate care activities to ensure that all appropriate care services are provided for the patient given their known medical histories using electronic quality (eQuality) monitoring. For many years we have used patient records as a data source for human abstraction of clinical research data. With the advent of electronic health record (EHR) data we can now make use of computable EHR data that can perform retrospective research studies more rapidly and lower the activation energy necessary to ask the next important question using electronic studies (eStudies). Barriers to these eStudies include: the lack of interoperable data between and among practices, the lack of computable definitions of measures, the lack of training of health professionals to use Ontology based Informatics tools that allow the execution of this type of logic, common methods need to be developed to distribute computable best practice rules to ensure rapid dissemination of evidence, better translating research into practice.

Automatic indexing in a drug information portal.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this work is to create a bilingual (French/English) Drug Information Portal (DIP), in a multi-terminological context and to emphasize its exploitation by an ATC automatic indexing allowing having more pertinent information about substances, organs or systems on which drugs act and their therapeutic and chemical characteristics. METHODS: The development of the DIP was based on the CISMeF portal, which catalogues and indexes the most important and quality-controlled sources of institutional health information in French. DIP has created specific functionalities and uses specific drugs terminologies such as the ATC classification which used to automatic index the DIP resources. RESULTS: DIP is the result of collaboration between the CISMeF team and the VIDAL Company, specialized in drug information. DIP is conceived to facilitate the user information retrieval. The ATC automatic indexing provided relevant results in 76% of cases. CONCLUSION: Using multi-terminological context and in the framework of the drug field, indexing drugs with the appropriate codes or/and terms revealed to be very important to have the appropriate information storage and retrieval. The main challenge in the coming year is to increase the accuracy of the approach.

Relevance of Google-customized search engine vs. CISMeF quality-controlled health gateway.

CISMeF (acronym for Catalog and Index of French Language Health Resources on the Internet) is a quality-controlled health gateway conceived to catalog and index the most important and quality-controlled sources of institutional health information in French. The goal of this study is to compare the relevance of results provided by this gateway from a small set of documents selected and described by human experts to those provided by a search engine from a large set of automatically indexed and ranked resources. The Google-Customized search engine (CSE) was used. The evaluation was made using the 10th first results of 15 queries and two blinded physician evaluators. There was no significant difference between the relevance of information retrieval in CISMeF and Google CSE. In conclusion, automatic indexing does not lead to lower relevance than a manual MeSH indexing and may help to cope with the increasing number of references to be indexed in a controlled health quality gateway.

Drug information portal in Europe: information retrieval with multiple health terminologies.

The objective of this work is the creation of a bilingual (French/English) drug information portal (DIP), in a multi-terminological context. The development of the DIP was based on the CISMeF portal, which catalogues and indexes the most important and quality-controlled sources of institutional health information in French. DIP has created specific functionalities related to drug and used specific drugs terminologies and classifications: the ATC classification, the CAS numbers, the French codes CIS, and CIP, as well as trade names and the International Nonproprietary Names of the drugs. DIP is the result of collaboration between the CISMeF team and the VIDAL private Company, specialized in drug information. DIP is conceived to facilitate the user information retrieval using several health terminologies. In the framework of the drug field, using multi-terminological context, indexing drugs with the appropriate codes or/and terms revealed to be very important to have the appropriate information storage and retrieval.

[Searching French institutional health information sources: catalogue and index of French-language medical sites (CISMeF)]. / Recherche des sources d'information institutionnelle de santé françaises: le "Catalogue et index des sites médicaux francophones" (CISMeF).

The Catalogue and index of French-language medical sites (CISMeF) is a medical portal that provides users with results as pertinent as possible according to their requirements, expectations, and context of use. Indexing and single-term research are based on theMedical subject headings(MeSH) thesaurus. The integration of new medical terminology for indexing the catalogue's resources is intended to minimize false-negatives during searches and to contextualize the users' needs. The creation of a drug information portal makes more targeted research possible, with numerous entries according to user (physicians, pharmacists, chemists, and pharmacologists). For simplicity's sake, the catalogue's index of resources by different nomenclatures is not entirely displayed. The choice of display is left to the user, with MeSH only as the default. These multi-nomenclature tools should be applicable as well to electronic patient records. In this case, the objective is to improve patient care by better searches and identification of the information required during consultations and hospitalization.

Multi-terminology indexing for the assignment of MeSH descriptors to medical abstracts in French.

BACKGROUND: To facilitate information retrieval in the biomedical domain, a system for the automatic assignment of Medical Subject Headings to documents curated by an online quality-controlled health gateway was implemented. The French Multi-Terminology Indexer (F-MTI) implements a multiterminology approach using nine main medical terminologies in French and the mappings between them. OBJECTIVE: This paper presents recent efforts to assess the added value of (a) integrating four new terminologies (Orphanet, ATC, drug names, MeSH supplementary concepts) into F-MTI's knowledge sources and (b) performing the automatic indexing on the titles and abstracts (vs. title only) of the online health resources. METHODS: F-MTI was evaluated on a CISMeF corpus comprising 18,161 manually indexed resources. RESULTS: The performance of F-MTI including nine health terminologies on CISMeF resources with Title only was 27.9% precision and 19.7% recall, while the performance on CISMeF resources with Title and Abstract is 14.9 % precision (-13.0%) and 25.9% recall (+6.2%). CONCLUSION: In a few weeks, CISMeF will launch the indexing of resources based on title and abstract, using nine terminologies.