Biomedical subjects

Benoît Thirion

Publications and source records attributed to Benoît Thirion.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Strategies for health information retrieval.

BACKGROUND: The amount of health data accessible on the Web is increasing and Internet has become a major source of health information. Many tools and search engines are available but medical information retrieval remains difficult for both the health professional and the patients. OBJECTIVE: In this paper we describe heuristics that aim at matching as much as possible queries with the content of the documents in the context of the CISMeF catalogue (Catalogue and Index of Health Resources in French) and its Doc'CISMeF search tool. The queries are represented by terms and the content of the documents is indexed by a terminology based on the MeSH thesaurus. RESULTS: Several operations are performed to match the terms of the terminology: natural language processing techniques on multi-words queries, phonemisation, spelling correction, plain text search with adjacency etc.. Each one is tested to evaluate its contribution in matching the terminology and the indexed documents. CONCLUSION: The implemented heuristics contribute significantly with good results in maximising as much as possible the recall of the Doc'CISMeF search tool.

France↗

PubMed2006

A method of cross-lingual consumer health information retrieval.

OBJECTIVES: This paper presents a method of cross-language information retrieval aiming to make medical information available to patients in French and English, regardless of the query language they wish to use. METHODS: We describe the two MeSH-related terminologies used in this work. We show that the French patient synonyms included in CISMeF can be automatically mapped to the English consumer-oriented health topics used in MEDLINEplus, via the MeSH thesaurus. The links between French and English patient terms thus inferred can subsequently be exploited to automatically translate patient queries. RESULTS: 129 MEDLINEplus topics have been mapped to 142 CISMeF patient synonyms. Contextual links for cross-language retrieval have been added to the patient dedicated French information Gateway CISMeF. CONCLUSION: we have presented an efficient method for cross-lingual patient information retrieval in French and English, which may also be applied to other language pairs, subject to the availability of patient terminologies and of the MeSH thesaurus in these languages.

France↗

PubMed2004

Using CISMeF MeSH "Encapsulated" terminology and a categorization algorithm for health resources.

INTRODUCTION: CISMeF is a Quality Controlled Health Gateway using a terminology based on the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus that displays medical specialties (metaterms) and the relationships existing between them and MeSH terms. OBJECTIVE: The need to classify the resources within the catalogue has led us to combine this type of semantic information with domain expert knowledge for health resources categorization purposes. MATERIAL AND METHODS: A two-step categorization process consisting of mapping resource keywords to CISMeF metaterms and ranking metaterms by decreasing coverage in the resource has been developed. We evaluate this algorithm on a random set of 123 resources extracted from the CISMeF catalogue. Our gold standard for this evaluation is the manual classification provided by a domain expert, viz. a librarian of the team. RESULTS: The CISMeF algorithm shows 81% precision and 93% recall, and 62% of the resources were assigned a "fully relevant" or "fairly relevant" categorization according to strict standards. DISCUSSION: A thorough analysis of the results has enabled us to find gaps in the knowledge modeling of the CISMeF terminology. The necessary adjustments having been made, the algorithm is currently used in CISMeF for resource categorization.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

PubMed2004

Enhancing the MeSH thesaurus to retrieve French online health resources in a quality-controlled gateway.

The amount of health information available on the Internet is considerable. In this context, several health gateways have been developed. Among them, CISMeF (Catalogue and Index of Health Resources in French) was designed to catalogue and index health resources in French. The goal of this article is to describe the various enhancements to the MeSH thesaurus developed by the CISMeF team to adapt this terminology to the broader field of health Internet resources instead of scientific articles for the medline bibliographic database. CISMeF uses two standard tools for organizing information: the MeSH thesaurus and several metadata element sets, in particular the Dublin Core metadata format. The heterogeneity of Internet health resources led the CISMeF team to enhance the MeSH thesaurus with the introduction of two new concepts, respectively, resource types and metaterms. CISMeF resource types are a generalization of the publication types of medline. A resource type describes the nature of the resource and MeSH keyword/qualifier pairs describe the subject of the resource. A metaterm is generally a medical specialty or a biological science, which has semantic links with one or more MeSH keywords, qualifiers and resource types. The CISMeF terminology is exploited for several tasks: resource indexing performed manually, resource categorization performed automatically, visualization and navigation through the concept hierarchies and information retrieval using the Doc'CISMeF search engine. The CISMeF health gateway uses several MeSH thesaurus enhancements to optimize information retrieval, hierarchy navigation and automatic indexing.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

PubMed2003

Towards a unified medical lexicon for French.

Medical Informatics has a constant need for basic Medical Language Processing tasks, e.g., for coding into controlled vocabularies, free text indexing and information retrieval. Most of these tasks involve term matching and rely on lexical resources: lists of words with attached information, including inflected forms and derived words, etc. Such resources are publicly available for the English language with the UMLS Specialist Lexicon, but not in other languages. For the French language, several teams have worked on the subject and built local lexical resources. The goal of the present work is to pool and unify these resources and to add extensively to them by exploiting medical terminologies and corpora, resulting in a unified medical lexicon for French (UMLF). This paper exposes the issues raised by such an objective, describes the methods on which the project relies and illustrates them with experimental results.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2003

Modelisation of consumer health information in a quality-controlled gateway.

The amount of health data accessible on the Web is increasing and Internet has become a major source of health information. Many tools and search engines are available but medical information retrieval remains difficult for both the health professional and the patients. In this paper we describe CISMeF-patients. It is a sub-part of CISMeF, a structured quality-controlled subject gateway. CISMeF-patients has been designed for the patients, their families and the general public who are often unfamiliar with the medical domain and the medical vocabulary. The resources included in CISMeF-patients are described using the Dublin Core metadata format. To index them, CISMeF-patients and CISMeF share the same terminology, which 'encapsulates' the MeSH thesaurus with a layer of synonyms. Unlike Medline-plus and Medline, sharing the same terminology allows to a CISMeF-patients end-user the possibility to extend his query to the CISMeF catalogue (e.g. for searching teaching resources or clinical guidelines).

Abstracting and Indexing↗

PubMed2003

UMLF: a Unified Medical Lexicon for French.

Lexical resources for medical language, such as lists of words with inflectional and derivational information, are publicly available for the English lantuate with the UMLS Specialist Lexicon. The goal of the UMLF project is to pool and unify existing resources and to add extensively to them by exploiting medical terminologies and corpora, resulting in a Unified Medical Lexicon for French. We present here the current status of the project.

France↗