PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

Benoit Thirion

Publications and source records attributed to Benoit Thirion.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

A MEDLINE categorization algorithm.

BACKGROUND: Categorization is designed to enhance resource description by organizing content description so as to enable the reader to grasp quickly and easily what are the main topics discussed in it. The objective of this work is to propose a categorization algorithm to classify a set of scientific articles indexed with the MeSH thesaurus, and in particular those of the MEDLINE bibliographic database. In a large bibliographic database such as MEDLINE, finding materials of particular interest to a specialty group, or relevant to a particular audience, can be difficult. The categorization refines the retrieval of indexed material. In the CISMeF terminology, metaterms can be considered as super-concepts. They were primarily conceived to improve recall in the CISMeF quality-controlled health gateway. METHODS: The MEDLINE categorization algorithm (MCA) is based on semantic links existing between MeSH terms and metaterms on the one hand and between MeSH subheadings and metaterms on the other hand. These links are used to automatically infer a list of metaterms from any MeSH term/subheading indexing. Medical librarians manually select the semantic links. RESULTS: The MEDLINE categorization algorithm lists the medical specialties relevant to a MEDLINE file by decreasing order of their importance. The MEDLINE categorization algorithm is available on a Web site. It can run on any MEDLINE file in a batch mode. As an example, the top 3 medical specialties for the set of 60 articles published in BioMed Central Medical Informatics & Decision Making, which are currently indexed in MEDLINE are: information science, organization and administration and medical informatics. CONCLUSION: We have presented a MEDLINE categorization algorithm in order to classify the medical specialties addressed in any MEDLINE file in the form of a ranked list of relevant specialties. The categorization method introduced in this paper is based on the manual indexing of resources with MeSH (terms/subheadings) pairs by NLM indexers. This algorithm may be used as a new bibliometric tool.

Abstracting and Indexing↗
PubMed2006

A web-based teaching resource to prepare for final undergraduate examination: a French pilot study.

Access to accurate and quality-controlled health information on the Internet for medical students is not an easy task. CISMeF is the search tool of a MeSH-indexed directory of medical Internet resources in French. Since 2004, a new French Pre-Residency Examination (PRE) is compulsory for all medical students in the 6th year of the curriculum. The goal of this study is to evaluate CISMeF as a tool to provide teaching resources available on the Internet covering PRE material. The CISMeF terminology and the PRE CISMeF module are described. To assess the CISMeF performance in covering PRE program, its precision (number of relevant resources/number of overall resources extracted by CISMeF) and coverage (number of PRE questions covered by at least one resource in the CISMeF gateway) were computed. The CISMeF module for the new French Pre-Residency Examination is efficient as it already covers 95.7% of the program with a precision of 82.2%. Our data demonstrates that CISMeF is acceptable to guide students' learning and should be a useful teaching resource for the preparation of the French Pre-Residency Examination.

Education, Medical, Undergraduate↗
PubMed2006

An introduction to the Semantic Web for health sciences librarians.

OBJECTIVES: The paper (1) introduces health sciences librarians to the main concepts and principles of the Semantic Web (SW) and (2) briefly reviews a number of projects on the handling of biomedical information that uses SW technology. METHODOLOGY: The paper is structured into two main parts. "Semantic Web Technology" provides a high-level description, with examples, of the main standards and concepts: extensible markup language (XML), Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema (RDFS), ontologies, and their utility in information retrieval, concluding with mention of more advanced SW languages and their characteristics. "Semantic Web Applications and Research Projects in the Biomedical Field" is a brief review of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), Generalised Architecture for Languages, Encyclopedias and Nomenclatures in Medicine (GALEN), HealthCyberMap, LinkBase, and the thesaurus of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The paper also mentions other benefits and by-products of the SW, citing projects related to them. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: Some of the problems facing the SW vision are presented, especially the ways in which the librarians' expertise in organizing knowledge and in structuring information may contribute to SW projects.

Humans↗
PubMed2003

Metadata element set in a quality-controlled subject gateway: a step to a health semantic Web.

BACKGROUND: Quality-controlled subject gateways are Internet services which apply a selected set of targeted measures to support systematic resource discovery. Considerable manual effort is used to process a selection of resources which meet quality criteria and to display a extensive description and indexing of these resources with standards-based metadata. OBJECTIVE: Several metadata element sets are proposed to describe, index and quality health resources to be included in a French quality-controlled health gateway called CISMeF. The main objectives were to enhance Internet health document retrieval and navigation, and to allow interoperability with other Internet services. RESULTS: The Dublin Core metadata element set is used to describe and index all Internet health resources included in CISMeF. For teaching resources, some elements from IEEE1484 Learning Object Metadata are also used. For evidenced-base medicine resources, specific metadata are employed which assess the health content quality. The HIDDEL metadata set is used to enhance transparency, trust and quality of health information on the Internet. CONCLUSION: Comprehensive metadata element sets can be extremely useful to describe, index and assess health resources on the Internet in a quality-controlled subject gateway. Machine-readable metadata creates an Semantic Web which is more efficient for end-users as compared to the current Web.

Abstracting and Indexing↗
PubMed2002

Webmastering in academic institutions: a new job opportunity.

In cyberspace, the health webmaster could be regarded as a virtual editor-in-chief, in charge of content and design. In this circumstance, he/she must follow quality criteria when building any resource. At the Rouen University Hospital (RUH), we have chosen "Net Scoring" as an effective tool to aid the design of a quality Web site. "Net Scoring" contains a list of 49 criteria which fall into eight categories: credibility, content, links, design, interactivity, quantitative aspects, ethics, and accessibility. The webmaster is the key element of the editorial board process. He/she must regularly monitor the Web site in order to retrieve information about whether the site is used and by whom: the method most commonly used is log analysis. At the RUH, an average of 9,000 unique machines visit our Web site each working day. Webmaster is a new job opportunity in academic institutions, in particular for medical informaticians and medical librarians both whom are information science professionals.

France↗