Changes in the attitudes of professors and students of medicine towards arabicizing medical terms in the faculties of medicine: A study from Jordan.

This study aimed to investigate changes in awareness, attitudes, acceptability, and possible barriers to using Arabicized medical terms in teaching and daily communication in medical colleges in Jordan. Using a cross-sectional online survey, medicine students and professors in Jordanian universities were sampled to survey their awareness, attitudes, and barriers toward Arabicized medical terms. Responses to the surveys were quantified into awareness, attitudes, and barriers scores and compared according to the sociodemographic variables of the study sample. Results of the current study showed positive awareness/acceptability and attitudes among medicine students toward Arabicized medical terms. The most common perceived barriers toward Arabicization among medicine students were that teaching and assessments (exams, quizzes, projects, etc.) are in English and the unavailability of valuable medical references that use Arabic terms. Several demographic variables were associated with acceptability, attitudes, and/or barriers toward Arabicized terms among medicine students, including gender, income, place of living, level of medicine study, having more than one mother tongue, and language proficiency. Medicine university professors showed acceptable awareness and generally positive attitudes toward Arabicized terms. The most frequently cited barriers among medicine professors were in concordance with those pointed out by medicine students, which indicates the validity of these barriers. Gender and English language proficiency were the only factors associated with acceptability, attitudes, and/or barriers toward Arabicized terms among medicine university professors. In conclusion, the current study indicated a generally more suitable environment for utilizing Arabicized medical terms, especially when delineating major barriers facing medicine students and professors.

Improving medical term embeddings using UMLS Metathesaurus.

BACKGROUND: Health providers create Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to describe the conditions and procedures used to treat their patients. Medical notes entered by medical staff in the form of free text are a particularly insightful component of EHRs. There is a great interest in applying machine learning tools on medical notes in numerous medical informatics applications. Learning vector representations, or embeddings, of terms in the notes, is an important pre-processing step in such applications. However, learning good embeddings is challenging because medical notes are rich in specialized terminology, and the number of available EHRs in practical applications is often very small. METHODS: In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to learn embeddings of medical terms from a limited set of medical notes. The algorithm, called definition2vec, exploits external information in the form of medical term definitions. It is an extension of a skip-gram algorithm that incorporates textual definitions of medical terms provided by the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus. RESULTS: To evaluate the proposed approach, we used a publicly available Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-III) EHR data set. We performed quantitative and qualitative experiments to measure the usefulness of the learned embeddings. The experimental results show that definition2vec keeps the semantically similar medical terms together in the embedding vector space even when they are rare or unobserved in the corpus. We also demonstrate that learned vector embeddings are helpful in downstream medical informatics applications. CONCLUSION: This paper shows that medical term definitions can be helpful when learning embeddings of rare or previously unseen medical terms from a small corpus of specialized documents such as medical notes.

General population's knowledge about the anatomical locations of organs and medical terms today and 50 years ago: a replication study.

Background: Physicians are frequently not aware that patients may not be familiar with the meaning of medical terms or have limited knowledge about the location of organs. These aspects of functional health competence require particular attention when designing communication curricula for undergraduate medical students. The aim of our study was to evaluate the knowledge of laypersons about the anatomical locations of organs and the definitions of commonly used medical terms as relevant aspects of health literacy. Furthermore, we wished to compare it with the knowledge of a historical patient cohort who performed this study 50 years ago. Methods: In this replication study, multiple-choice questionnaires with simple anatomy and common medical terms which were published in 1970 were distributed among a convenience sample of lay volunteers (n=537) from the streets of Hamburg, Germany. Sociodemographic data including sex, age, highest educational school achievement, occupation in a field associated with medicine, and German as first language were also collected. The percentage of laypersons' correct answers was compared to the percentage of correct answers of a historical patient cohort (n=234) published in 1970 to identify the development of health literacy as basis for curricular planning. Results: Laypersons showed significantly more correct answers in four of eight simple anatomical locations of organs (p<0.001). For seven commonly used medical terms laypersons only gave significantly more correct answers for the definitions of "jaundice" (p<0.001) and "diarrhoea" (p=0.001) compared to the historical cohort from 1970. Participants with a senior high school degree performed significantly better with respect to total scores of correct organ locations (p<0.001, d=0.35) and correct definitions of medical terms (p=0.001, d=0.30) than participants who completed junior high school. Conclusion: The definitions of common medical terms and the correct anatomical locations of organs by laypersons have increased during the past 50 years but could still need improvement by school education and media information of better quality. Medical educators should know about the low health literacy of laypersons with respect to these aspects to raise medical students' awareness for this problem and to provide communication training for medical students to use comprehensible language during history taking and shared decision making.

Material de enseñanza del inglés con fines específicos para los estudiantes de ciencias médicas / Teaching material of the English language with specific ends for the students of medical sciences

Debido a la escasez de materiales de apoyo para la enseñanza del inglés con fines específicos, surgió la motivación de elaborar un glosario de sinónimos de términos médicos, a fin de facilitar la traducción, interpretación y comunicación de información científico-médica por parte de los profesionales de la salud, tanto en el ámbito nacional como extranjero. Para ello se revisaron diferentes artículos de las especialidades médicas y diccionarios; el producto final consistió en un material denominado "Glosario de sinónimos de términos médicos", cuya validación se realizó a través de la comparación de los resultados académicos, antes y después de su uso, y la opinión de los docentes que lo emplearon.

The motivation of elaborating a glossary of medical terms synonyms emerge due to the lack of support materials for the English language teaching with specific ends, in order to facilitate the translation, interpretation and communication of scientific-medical information for the health professionals, both in the national and foreign environment. Different works of the medical specialties and dictionaries were checked with this purpose; the final product consisted on a material denominated "Glossary of medical terms synonyms" whose validation was carried out through the comparison of the academic results, before and after its use, and the opinion of the teaching staff that used it.

Mining and standardizing chinese consumer health terms.

BACKGROUND: Health professionals and consumers use different terms to express medical events or concerns, which makes the communication barriers between the professionals and consumers. This may lead to bias in the diagnosis or treatment due to the misunderstanding or incomplete understanding. To solve the issue, a consumer health vocabulary was developed to map the consumer-used health terms to professional-used medical terms. METHODS: In this study, we extracted Chinese consumer health terms from both online health forum and patient education monographs, and manually mapped them to medical terms used by professionals (terms in medical thesauri or in medical books). To ensure the above annotation quality, we developed annotation guidelines. RESULTS: We applied our method to extract consumer-used disease terms in endocrinology, cardiology, gastroenterology and dermatology. In this study, we identified 1349 medical mentions from 8436 questions posted in an online health forum and 1428 articles for patient education monographs. After manual annotation and review, we released 1036 Chinese consumer health terms with mapping to 480 medical terms. Four annotators worked on the manual annotation work following the Chinese consumer health term annotation guidelines. Their average inter-annotator agreement (IAA) score was 93.91% ensuring high consistency of the released terms. CONCLUSIONS: We extracted Chinese consumer health terms from online forum and patient education monographs, and mapped them to medical terms used by professionals. Manual annotation efforts have been made for term annotating and mapping. Our study may contribute to the Chinese consumer health vocabulary construction. In addition, our annotated corpus, both the contexts of consumer health terms and consumer-professional term mapping, would be a useful resource for automatic methodology development. The dataset of the Chinese consumer health terms (CHT) is publicly available at http://www.phoc.org.cn/cht/ .

Levels of understanding of the rules of correct medical usage among vietnamese pharmacy students: a cross-sectional study.

BACKGROUND: Comprehensive misunderstanding about medicine usage is often associated with high treatment risks which have led to unexpected and adverse effects or even death. Many researches assessing health literacy have been undertaken, but only in adults. This study was undertaken to evaluate the level of understanding in students of medical terms and its correlation with gender, grade and parental occupation. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted from September to October 2017 with 594 students (28.6% of men and 71.4% of women) of Hanoi University of Pharmacy from freshman to fifth-year students chosen randomly. The knowledge of pharmacy students was assessed by a questionnaire including 25 medical terms. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square test were used with p < 0.05 as level of statistical significance. RESULTS: The level of understanding of students was high with most of medical terms reaching over 70% correct answers. A positive significant association between health literacy and education was found with higher knowledge demonstrated in upper years, while there was no difference among students with and without parents belonging to the medical field. Regarding the relation with gender, there was no significant correlation for most medical terms. CONCLUSIONS: Levels of understanding of medical terms in pharmacy students was high, presenting a significant association with education. This study should be extended in order to assess the level of health literacy in various populations, thereby indirect evaluating implementation of medical preventive programs.

Responses of Korean physical therapy students after practice with a virtual anatomical system in Japan.

[Purpose] To investigate responses of Korean physical therapy students, receiving medical terminology education in physical therapy both in Korean and English, after practice with a virtual anatomical system. [Subjects and Methods] The participants were 25 physical therapy students from Konyang University in South Korea visiting the International University of Health and Welfare for training purposes. The virtual anatomy practice was conducted in English using 3 dimensional virtual anatomy software constructed using real cadaver photographs. A questionnaire about this practice and anatomy was completed after the practice. [Results] The results of the questionnaire showed a trend toward high scores for virtual anatomy practice. [Conclusion] The present virtual anatomy system was created using multi-directional photographs from a real cadaver; therefore, it can be used as an auxiliary means of education using cadavers.

An Italian validation of "meter", an easy-to-use Health Literacy (hl) screener.

Health Literacy (HL) is the degree to which individuals have the capability to obtain, understand and process basic health information needed to make appropriate health decisions. It affects persons' ability to access and use health care, to interact with providers, and to care for themselves. Established literacy screeners have practical limitations (such as practictioner's attendance, time to complete, etc.): to address these, a short, self-administered measure of HL, the Medical Term Recognition Test (METER) was introduced in USA. In this study an Italian version (IMETER) of this measure has been validated administering it to undergraduate students, attending Medicine, Arts and Engineering faculties. The results of this study show a high degree of reliability and validity of the test when comparing the skills of students educated in medical matters and those of non-biological faculties, indicating the potential capability of the tool to screen low HL levels in larger population. Despite the limits of this pilot study, IMETER's quick and easy administration method seems useful not only in clinical settings, but also to ease the implementation of future larger studies.

Strategies for automatic extraction of key words from medical news / 中华医学图书情报杂志

The strategies for automatic extraction of key words from medical news were put forward by adding the MeSH terms into the general classification table in combination with the length of MeSH terms and location-weigh-ted MeSH terms.The key words randomly selected from 100 papers reporting medical news on 10 Websites were in-dexed and verified by machine indexing.The extraction accuracy was 0.34 and the recall rate was 0.30, showing that the strategies can be used for automatic extraction of key words from medical news.

Classification and Evaluation of Medical Terms in Briefing Papers Given to Patients about Adverse Drug Reactions / 医薬品情報学

<b>Objective: </b>Nowadays, patient-centered medical care is essential.  It is very important to use layman’s terms that patients can understand. However, most medical staff tend to use difficult medical terms.  The purpose of this study was to investigate the amount of difficult medical terms in briefing papers given to patients.<br><b>Methods: </b>We conducted a questionnaire survey on September 21, 2012 of 246 non-medical professionals in order to identify difficult medical terms used in a manual for handling disorders due to adverse drug reactions.<br><b>Result: </b>It was found that there were 387 terms of those in the manual (<i>n</i>=980) that non-medical professionals had never seen or heard before (39.5%).  There were 128 terms for which they could not correctly replace Japanese kana (phonetic) characters with kanji (pictorial) characters (13.1%).<br><b>Conclusion: </b>The results indicate that the manual has many terms that are difficult for non-medical professionals to understand.  This may hinder patients’ comprehension.  These difficult medical terms need to be replaced with layman’s terms.

The establishment of medical terms in Korea

The first Medical Terminology was published by the Korean Medical Association in 1977 in Korea. Since then 4 more editions of Medical Terminology have been published. The final one, the 5th edition was published in 2009. Among these, in the 3rd edition, almost all of the medical terms were words in Chinese characters. In contrast, the 4th edition had been completely changed. Almost all of the terms were Hangul (Korean language) terms. The 5th edition accepted both terms in Chinese characters and Hangul terms. Owing to this major shift in medical terminology, users of medical terms have been greatly inconvenienced. At present, the Medical Terminology Committee of the Korean Medical Association are carrying out the work of selecting the representative term for each medical term. Medical terms should be easily understandable because medical terms are used by lay people as well as medical doctors. For easy and efficient communication between the doctor and the patient, it is not important whether the term is in Chinese characters or Hangul terms. The work of selecting representative terms should be carried out in rational way. Close communication and cooperation between the Medical Terminology Committee of the Korean Medical Association and each academic medical society in the Republic of Korea is necessary for consistency in establishing medical terminology. A system for collection and translation of medical terms newly coined and imported from abroad should be developed.

Medical Jargon Used in Health Care Communication of Family Physician / 가정의학회지

BACKGROUND: When physicians use the medical terms difficult to understand the meaning, patients regard it as an authority of the physician. It has negative influence on physician-patient relationship and hinders delivering accurate meaning to the patient. The purpose of this research is to investigate what kind of medical terms which meaning is difficult to understand (medical jargon) are used in medical interviews and survey the patients' understanding of the medical terms. METHODS: In the preceding study 67 cases of physicians' interviewing with patient were videotaped in the family medicine clinic of a university hospital and they were transcribed from August, 2005 to January, 2007. For this study 60 cases of the transcribed conversations, which interviewing was completely recorded, were assessed for analyzing the content and frequency of medical jargon. The author selected 10 medical terms used in this study's interviews and surveyed the patients' understanding of the medical terms, who visited the family medicine clinic, by questionnaires. RESULTS: In 26 of 60 interviews one or more medical jargon were used by the physician. In 39 of 73 terms (53.4%) the physicians explained meaning of the medical terms to the patient. 213 patients responded to the questionnaires. More than half (median, 55.4%; range, 11.7 to 75.1%) of the respondents expressed that they 'never know' or 'hardly know' the meaning of the medical terms if it was used without explanation. The scores of level of patients' understanding of 10 medical terms significantly increased according to increasing level of income, but the trend is not statistically significant according to increasing age, difference of sex, and level of education. CONCLUSION: The family physicians used medical jargon in 43.3% of medical interviews, and they explained meaning of the medical terms to the patients for more than half of the terms. More than half of the patients in a university hospital family medicine clinic responded that they never knew or hardly knew meaning of the medical terms if they were used without explanation.

Monshinhyo That Are Also Comprehensible to Foreigners: Monshinhyo Comprehension Research / 国際保健医療

<b>Introduction</b><br> Recently, foreign residents' difficulties using the Japanese medical system are being acknowledged. This study investigates the case of the medical intake forms, <i>monshinhyo</i>, that new patients at Japanese medical facilities must complete.Many patients, especially non-native ones, find them difficult.<br><b>Method</b><br> First, 6 foreign and 6 Japanese students (hereafter, FS and JS) at 4-year universities were interviewed regarding their understanding of <i>monshinhyo</i> taken from three different departments -obstetrical, surgical, and internal medicine - at a hospital in Kansai; then, a questionnaire was developed and given to 25 FS and 85 JS.<br><b>Results</b><br> Both FS and JS noted language problems. JS could pronounce medical terms better than FS but comprehended them only about as well as FS. Moreover, both FS and JS found the styles, layouts, and purposes of some questions unclear, and they sometimes had to guess the details of what <i>monshinhyo</i> requested. These included questions involving symptoms, divisions of medical departments, and semantic range of terms for blood relations. Also, medical practices/norms not found in the native country sometimes puzzled FS.<br><b>Conclusions</b><br> Problems with <i>monshinhyo</i> arise from <i>both</i> the patients' side-Japanese as well as foreign-due to limited medical-related vocabulary/kanji and/or a lack of experience using Japanese medical services, <i>and</i> the <i>monshinhyo</i> themselves, due to their inclusion of unclear questions and ambiguous expressions. Probably, <i>monshinhyo's</i> authors' familiarity with medical terms and the Japanese medical system caused them to take for granted more knowledge than many patients actually have. To improve medical services, therefore, we suggest reexamining and reorganizing questions that already exist, introducing multiple choice and yes/no questions when possible, and providing <i>furigana</i> for <i>kanji</i>. Fundamentally, throughout the medical system, patients should be able to understand all the language they encounter. Clarifying the language, cultural assumptions, and purpose(s) of <i>monshinhyo</i> is a good starting point.

About the Reformed Medical Terms / 소아과

Concerning our medical history, the importance of medical terms has been neglected for a long time. In addition, medical terminologies are unaccustomed to the patients including the public. The separation of communications between the public and medical participants has been enlarged more and more. The importance of terms which can be easily recognized, comfortable to the ear, and familiar to the public have arose to the point when the Korean Medical Association established a medical terms enactment in 1976 and made the first series of medical terms. These efforts have been continued to the second in 1983, the third in 1992 and the fourth series in 2001. Throughout this revision, we wish new terms of fourth series may contribute to the better communication between the doctors and patients. It will be able to function as a better and enhanced tool to the public who require medical information. The terms of present lecture are based on the fourth series of medical terms. Because it is irrational to use all the reformed terms, in this lecture we have used the most commonly used clinical terms as a hope for the pediatricians to give better medical treatment.

Improved Medical Terminologies as Foundation for Good Practice

A harmonious relationship between doctors and their patients establishes a firm foundation for good practice. Factors that affect such a relationship include communication skills and the language used. Essentially, the language should be clear and comprehensible for both parties. Doctors usually tend to use technical jargons. Since Korean doctors were educated with English textbooks, they are inclined to teach their students in English terms. Their use of old medical terms makes communication with their patients very difficult. Such language impediment complicates matters when doctors have to answer the patients' questions and ask detailed questions about their condition. And it is not only in the use of English where communication problems arise between doctors and patients. Most of these problems can also be traced to the use of old medical terminologies originating from the difficult Chinese characters. The Korean medical community has been conducting a campaign to replace existing difficult medical terms with plain Korean, Hangul terms. Particularly, members of the board of medical education are expected to make active use of the new terms in their teaching fields, in writing research papers, and in their clinical practice.

Changing Trend of the Medical Terms

To revise the medical terms, the Korean medical association(KMA) organized the committee for medical terms(CMT). CMT has worked for translation of medical terms into Korean, more easy to understand, more meaningful, and good to pronounce. Medical terms appearing in the 3rd and 2nd editions of termonology books were evaluated by board members of the committee, who have special interest in medical terms and are expert terminologists. Modern medical terms in foreign language are not easy to understand not only by doctors but also by medical students. Thus regular translation of foreign language terms into Korean terms in necessary. The medical terms, especially in the field of internal medicine, are built up on the backbone of basic sience and basic medical terms. Fortunately, the Association of Korean Anatomy published a terminology book of anatomy in Korean language. It prompted other medical societies to translate medical terms into Korean language. The field of internal medicine has been recently divided into several subspecialilies in Korea such as gastro-intestinology, cardiology, pulmonology, nephrology, endocrinology, hemato-oncology, reheumatogy, allergy, and infectious disease. Some subspecial societies have there own terminology books. This raised some problems, because the translation yielded somewhat different meanings even in the same terms in the terminology books. Therefore, CMT organized and conducted concensus meeting to discuss the different points of the same terms. The topics of education by CMT included the way to translate foreign terms, the criteria of beautiful language, and the root of medical terms.

⌜Medical Termonology ; the 4th Edition⌟and the Properties of Technical Terms

This paper demonstrates the properties of technical terms in general and introduces the efforts to refine the medical terms in contemporary Korean. There are many Sino-Korean terms which are too difficult to comprehend in the medical field. In the ⌜Medical Termonology ; the 4th edition⌟, we suggest many original Korean words be substituted for the Sino-Korean words. This suggestion has been made with cautin and it is hoped that the new terms will gradually replace the traditional Sino-Korean terms.

Textbooks of Western Medicine in the Early Modernization Period / 의사학

The first modern hospital, royal Kwang-Hye-Won (House of Extended Grace) was established in April of 1885, whose name was changed into royal Che-Jung-Won (House of Helpfulness) in several days. Private(not royal) Je-Jung-Won opened its Medical School in 1899. And the teachers composed of western missionaries taught some Korean student-assistants the Western medicine with English textbooks in English. With very low effectiveness of teaching due to language barrier, Dr. Avison, the principal of that school decided to write medical textbooks in Korean. At first he tried to translate Henry Gray's Anatomy of 1859. In the effort he referred some Chinese and Japanese medical books. With that reason, we can find many Japanese style medical terms in some medical books of his. On the other hand, Eui-Hak-Kyo(The Medical School) was established by the Government of Dae-Han Empire in 1899. The teaching staff of the school published medical textbooks in Korean, some of which were written by Japanese doctors. After the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, Japanese government forced teachers of the school to teach with Japanese medical books and to speak Japanese in teaching. In 1915 the Act of Private Education was declared, which forced Japanese spoken in teaching even in the private medical school, Severance Medical School(later self of private Che-Jung-Won). In these ways, Japanese medical terms of Chinese letter were introduced without prudent consolidation, which evoke not a few problems in medical terms and education still now.

The Transition of Medical Terms in Korea between 1935 and 1985 / 의사학

Korean modern medicine was imported from American missionaries in the late 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, Japanese medicine, which was influenced by German medicine, was imported along with the Japanese invasion. After the liberation of Korea, however, American medicine influenced the Korean Medicine in a broad spectrum : for example, medical science, medical instruments, and health care system. Not only an unstable social environment but also the rapid development of medical science changed medical terms. In order to investigate the 50-year transition of medical terms in Korea, we compare the names of diseases in 'Cho-Sun-Eu-Bo' published in 1934, 1935 and 1936 with those in the 'Journal of the Korean Medical Association' published in 1985. The names of diseases were classified according to number 17 classification method of ICD9(International Classification of Disease). The proportionate ratio of the number of names of disease between 1935 and 1985 was 3.2 in neoplasms, 3.1 in diseases of the circulatory system, and 2.7 in mental disorders. The causes of the transition of the names of diseases were three. The first was the simple change of the rules of spelling, the second was the change of the concept of disease, and the third was the subdivision of diseases. 26.1%(N=37) of the names of diseases in 1935(N=142) were changed by 1985.