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Biomedical subjects

A L Rector

Publications and source records attributed to A L Rector.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2004

Attitudes and access to electronic exchange of information on occupational disease.

BACKGROUND: THOR is a network of work-related disease surveillance schemes dependent on volunteer case reporting by medical specialists. Data collection and dissemination has hitherto been paper-based. AIMS: To elicit the opinion of existing reporters in THOR on electronic exchange of information and to assess the practical capabilities of the same reporters to participate in electronic communication. METHODS: A mail-based questionnaire of randomly selected THOR reporters using closed format questions. RESULTS: The response rate to the questionnaire was 66% (253/383). Almost half (47%) of the responders wanted dissemination of information solely in an electronic form, 35% favoured paper-based reports, while 16% wanted both paper and electronic reports. Two-thirds (66%) would make use of electronic archives of reports and 59% would use this facility to resolve questions by accessing accumulated data. The majority (82%) read e-mail more than once a week and 34% browsed the web as frequently. However, 5% did not have e-mail and 6% never browsed the web. Most responders judged their internet connectivity to be rapid (68%) and convenient (83%), and 91% could receive e-mail attachments. CONCLUSIONS: Most responders have the skills and infrastructure required to engage in electronic information exchange, and are favourably disposed to electronic means of communication. However it is also relevant to note that one-third of responders have a preference for the existing paper-based system.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed2003

OpenGALEN: open source medical terminology and tools.

The GALEN programme of research into medical terminology began in 1991. In 1999 OpenGALEN was formed to provide an open source route both for disseminating the results of that programme and as a framework for its future development. Currently available open source resources include a sophisticated ontology development environment and a large open source description logic-based ontology for the medical domain.

Intellectual Property↗
PubMed2001

The interface between information, terminology, and inference models.

The interface between information, terminology, and inference (problem solving) models is now a central issue for the development of standards and of principled information systems. There is potential overlap amongst the models, and principled means are required to choose how to allocate information items amongst them. Any given set of choices implies mutual constraints and obligations amongst the models which together form a well defined interface allowing work on each to proceed independently of the other. This paper outlines the criteria for these choices and a possible notation for recording these choices and their consequences.

Information Theory↗
PubMed2001

Integrating existing drug formulation terminologies into an HL7 standard classification using OpenGALEN.

Many terminologies exist for the form of drugs--i.e. tablets, capsules, sprays, suppositories, etc. However, they have surprisingly different content. To communicate medication messages effectively, a mechanism is needed to translate between these existing terminologies. An ontological approach, based on techniques developed by OpenGALEN, has been used to build a drug form terminology for HL7 version 3. It integrates existing terminologies from commercial drug information vendors and regulatory authorities, and provides a framework for translating between them. To date, term sets have been included from First DataBank, the FDA, Multum and Micromedex, to produce a terminology of 820 concepts. The approach is made practical by distributing the knowledge engineering effort to volunteers with experience of the domain, and then integrating the knowledge into a logically consistent classification.

Chemistry, Pharmaceutical↗
PubMed2000

NLP techniques associated with the OpenGALEN ontology for semi-automatic textual extraction of medical knowledge: abstracting and mapping equivalent linguistic and logical constructs.

This research project presents methodological and theoretical issues related to the inter-relationship between linguistic and conceptual semantics, analysing the results obtained by the application of a NLP parser to a set of radiology reports. Our objective is to define a technique for associating linguistic methods with domain specific ontologies for semi-automatic extraction of intermediate representation (IR) information formats and medical ontological knowledge from clinical texts. We have applied the Edinburgh LTG natural language parser to 2810 clinical narratives describing radiology procedures. In a second step, we have used medical expertise and ontology formalism for identification of semantic structures and abstraction of IR schemas related to the processed texts. These IR schemas are an association of linguistic and conceptual knowledge, based on their semantic contents. This methodology aims to contribute to the elaboration of models relating linguistic and logical constructs based on empirical data analysis. Advance in this field might lead to the development of computational techniques for automatic enrichment of medical ontologies from real clinical environments, using descriptive knowledge implicit in large text corpora sources.

Electronic Data Processing↗
PubMed2000

Having our cake and eating it too: how the GALEN Intermediate Representation reconciles internal complexity with users' requirements for appropriateness and simplicity.

Clinical terminologies are complex objects, getting more complex as the requirements on them grow, and as more complex technologies are used in their construction. But to the clinical end-user, functionality and utility is important, not inherent complexity--the simpler a clinical terminology can be for the end-user, the better. To reconcile these contradictory requirements, the GALEN Programme has developed an Intermediate Representation that allows the OpenGALEN Clinical Terminology to retain a high degree of internal complexity, whilst allowing it to be efficiently maintained, and easily used. This paper describes the elements of the Intermediate Representation, how it works, and some experience of its use.

Abstracting and Indexing↗
PubMed1999

A reference terminology for drugs.

GALEN technology for re-usable terminologies using formal classification is being applied to the creation and maintenance of a reference terminology for drugs. GALEN's techniques are being used to address specific deficiencies of existing drug classifications that make it difficult to create and maintain guidelines to support prescribing in the care of patients with chronic diseases. The reference terminology is in two parts; firstly, a re-usable and automatically-classified 'ontology' is built with GALEN technology; this describes generic drugs, their composition in terms of chemicals and chemical classes, their actions, indications and interactions. Secondly, a 'dictionary' of prescribable proprietary products is integrated with this ontology. The result is a drug resource designed to support both the traditional uses of a drug knowledge base (e.g. prescribing and messaging), and the specialized demands of guideline authoring and execution.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMed1999

Clinical terminology: why is it so hard?

Despite years of work, no re-usable clinical terminology has yet been demonstrated in widespread use. This paper puts forward ten reasons why developing such terminologies is hard. All stem from underestimating the change entailed in using terminology in software for 'patient centred' systems rather than for its traditional functions of statistical and financial reporting. Firstly, the increase in scale and complexity are enormous. Secondly, the resulting scale exceeds what can be managed manually with the rigour required by software, but building appropriate rigorous representations on the necessary scale is, in itself, a hard problem. Thirdly, 'clinical pragmatics'--practical data entry, presentation and retrieval for clinical tasks--must be taken into account, so that the intrinsic differences between the needs of users and the needs of software are addressed. This implies that validation of clinical terminologies must include validation in use as implemented in software.

Medical Informatics↗
PubMed1998

Reconciling users' needs and formal requirements: issues in developing a reusable ontology for medicine.

A common language, or terminology, for representing what clinicians have said and done is an important requirement for individual clinical systems, and it is a pre-requisite for integrating disparate applications in a distributed telematic healthcare environment. Formal representations based on description logics or closely related formalisms are increasingly used for representing medical terminologies. GALEN's experience in using one such formalism raises two major issues, as follows: how to make ontologies based on description logics easy to use and understand for both clinicians and applications developers; what features are required of the ontology and description logic if they are to achieve their aims. Based on our experience we put forward four contentions: two relating to each of these two issues, as follows: that natural language generation is essential to make a description logic based ontology accessible to users; that the description logic based ontology should be treated as an "assembly language" and accessed via "intermediate representations" oriented to users and "perspectives" adapting it to specific applications; that independence and reuse are best supported by partitioning the subsumption hierarchy of elementary concepts into orthogonal taxonomies, each of which forms a pure tree in which the branches at each level are disjoint but nonexhaustive subconcepts of the parent concept; that the expressivity of the description logic must include support for transitive relations despite the computational cost, and that this computational cost is acceptable in practice. The authors argue that these features will be necessary, though by no means sufficient, for the development of any large reusable ontology for medicine.

Clinical Medicine↗
PubMed1998

Thesauri and formal classifications: terminologies for people and machines.

Terminologies are now software. They are key components of the integration of electronic patient records, decision support systems and information retrieval systems. To be used as software, the different types of content in traditional terminologies must be separated, which we term here: conceptual, linguistic, inferential and pragmatic. The conceptual knowledge at the heart of the terminology needs to be expressed formally in order to provide a dependable framework for the other types of knowledge. Information left implicit in most existing coding and classification systems must be made explicit. The test of the resulting terminologies is how well they support software for key functions: including data entry, information retrieval, mediation, indexing, and authoring.

Abstracting and Indexing↗
PubMed1997

The GRAIL concept modelling language for medical terminology.

The GALEN representation and integration language (GRAIL) has been developed to support effective clinical user interfaces and extensible re-usable models of medical terminology. It has been used successfully to develop the prototype GALEN common reference (CORE) model for medical terminology and for a series of projects in clinical user interfaces within the GALEN and PEN&PAD projects. GRAIL is a description logic or frame language with novel features to support part-whole and other transitive relations and to support the GALEN modelling style aimed at re-use and application independence. GRAIL began as an experimental language. However, it has clarified many requirements for an effective knowledge representation language for clinical concepts. It still has numerous limitations despite its practical successes. The GRAIL experience is expected to form the basis for future languages which meet the same requirements but have greater expressiveness and more soundly based semantics. This paper provides a description and motivation for the GRAIL language and gives examples of the modelling paradigm which it supports.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMed1997

Rubrics to dissections to GRAIL to classifications.

This paper summarises the process in the GALEN-IN-USE project by which rubrics from traditional medical coding schemes are analysed into an intermediate, relatively informal conceptual representation which is then automatically translated into the GRAIL formalism and its Common Reference Model.

Europe↗
PubMed1997

Terminological systems: bridging the generation gap.

A rigorous formal description of the intended behaviour of a compositional terminology, a 'third generation' system, enables powerful semantic processing techniques to assist in the building of a large terminology. Use of an intermediate representation derived from such a formalism, but simplified to resemble a 'second generation' system, enables authors to work in an simpler and more familiar environment, avoiding many of the technical complications of the 'third generation' system.

Classification↗
PubMed1996

Mapping the GALEN CORE model to SNOMED-III: initial experiments.

As an experiment, a physician without prior training developed a model of two contiguous segments of the SNOMED disease chapter along with related sections from the Topography, Function and Morphology chapters. Effort required, coverage, reasons for difficulties and added value to SNOMED are examined.

Abstracting and Indexing↗