Biomedical subjects

J Charlet

Publications and source records attributed to J Charlet.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1998

From text to knowledge: a unifying document-centered view of analyzed medical language.

Although medical language processing (MLP) has achieved some success, the actual use and dissemination of data extracted from free text by MLP systems is still very limited. We claim that the adoption of an 'enriched-document' paradigm (or 'document-centered' view) can help to address this issue. We present this paradigm and explain how it can be implemented, then discuss its expected benefits both for end-users and MLP researchers.

Artificial Intelligence↗

PubMed1998

Hospitexte: towards a document-based hypertextual electronic medical record.

The patient record is a repository for knowledge about a patient. Work in Artificial Intelligence and knowledge representation has evidenced the intrinsic difficulty of formalizing knowledge for computer processing. It is therefore not a surprise that most attempts at computerizing the patient record have only had a limited degree of success or applicability. We claim that this is due to the fact that medicine is an empirical domain, and thus fundamentally resists formalization. Therefore, the only way medical knowledge can be fully expressed is through natural languages which is indeed what clinicians actually use. We proposed and designed an electronic medical record which adheres to this hypothesis and where structured documents play a prominent role.

Artificial Intelligence↗

PubMed1997

Evaluating a normalized conceptual representation produced from natural language patient discharge summaries.

The Menelas project aimed to produce a normalized conceptual representation from natural language patient discharge summaries. Because of the complex and detailed nature of conceptual representations, evaluating the quality of output of such a system is difficult. We present the method designed to measure the quality of Menelas output, and its application to the state of the French Menelas prototype as of the end of the project. We examine this method in the framework recently proposed by Friedman and Hripcsak. We also propose two conditions which enable to reduce the evaluation preparation workload.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

PubMed1995

A multi-lingual architecture for building a normalised conceptual representation from medical language.

The overall goal of MENELAS is to provide better access to the information contained in natural language patient discharge summaries (PDSs), through the design and implementation of a prototype able to analyse medical texts. The approach taken by MENELAS is based on the following key principles: (i) to maximise the usefulness of natural language analysis and the usability of its results, the output of natural language analysis must be a normalised conceptual representation of medical information; and (ii) to maximise the reuse of resources, language analysis should be domain-independent and conceptual representation should be language-independent. This paper discusses the results obtained and the issues raised when implementing these principles during the project.

Artificial Intelligence↗

PubMed1995

Issues in the structuring and acquisition of an ontology for medical language understanding.

Medical natural language understanding basically aims at representing the contents of medical texts in a formal, conceptual representation. The understanding process itself increasingly relies on a body of domain knowledge, generally expressed in the same conceptual formalism. The design of such a conceptual representation is a key knowledge-acquisition issue. When representing knowledge, the most important point is to ensure that the formal exploitation of the knowledge representation conforms to its meaning in the domain. We examined some methodological and theoretical principles to enforce this conformity. These principles result from our experience in MENELAS, a medical language understanding project.

Artificial Intelligence↗

PubMed1986

Male influences on cervical cancer risk.

Risk factors for squamous cell carcinoma of the uterine cervix were studied among low income, married Hispanic women and their husbands, using a case-control design. A total of 45 eligible cases were identified at public hospitals and community clinics in the San Francisco Bay Area. For each case, a control was selected within two years of age from among Hispanic women seen at the same institution. Thirty-nine matched pairs of couples were interviewed to assess histories of sexual behavior and other possible risk factors. Cases and controls differed markedly in the number of past sexual partners of their husbands. Cases were 5.3 times more likely to be married to husbands who had had 20 or more sexual partners than were controls. Cases and controls themselves did not differ in their number of sexual partners, but cases were younger at first intercourse than were controls. The association with husband's sexual history persisted after adjusting for the woman's number of sexual partners or age at first intercourse. These results support the infectious and venereal transmission of cervical cancer and indicate the important role of husbands in its occurrence in a population with high incidence rates.

Adult↗