Panagiotis Stamatopoulos

PubMed2005

Summarization from medical documents: a survey.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper is to survey the recent work in medical documents summarization. BACKGROUND: During the last decade, documents summarization got increasing attention by the AI research community. More recently it also attracted the interest of the medical research community as well, due to the enormous growth of information that is available to the physicians and researchers in medicine, through the large and growing number of published journals, conference proceedings, medical sites and portals on the World Wide Web, electronic medical records, etc. METHODOLOGY: This survey gives first a general background on documents summarization, presenting the factors that summarization depends upon, discussing evaluation issues and describing briefly the various types of summarization techniques. It then examines the characteristics of the medical domain through the different types of medical documents. Finally, it presents and discusses the summarization techniques used so far in the medical domain, referring to the corresponding systems and their characteristics. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: The paper discusses thoroughly the promising paths for future research in medical documents summarization. It mainly focuses on the issue of scaling to large collections of documents in various languages and from different media, on personalization issues, on portability to new sub-domains, and on the integration of summarization technology in practical applications.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

PubMedDate not supplied

The natural history of HPV infection of the uterine cervix. Long-term observational and histological data.

BACKGROUND: To investigate the natural history of HPV infection of the uterine cervix following a 10-year prospective observational study. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Three hundred and thirty women with cytological and colposcopic features of HPV infection +/- CIN 1 were recruited into the study. These women were followed up for a period of 10 years, during which time they had repeated colposcopic assessments and cytological monitoring Those women with evidence of high-grade disease at any stage of follow-up were treated by Large Loop excision of the transformation zone (LLETZ) and excluded from the study. At the end of the surveillance period, 179 women with evidence of persistent HPV infection alone or in conjunction with low-grade disease underwent a shallow diagnostic LLETZ. In total, 51 women defaulted from follow-up. RESULTS: Thirty-three per cent of the women with cytological and colposcopic features suggestive of persistent HPV infection alone during the 10-year follow-up period had histological evidence of CIN at the end of the study. Two thirds of this disease was graded as CIN 2 or 3. Nineteen per cent of the women with cytological and colposcopic features suggestive of persistent HPV infection and CIN 1 actually had high-grade CIN at histology (CIN 2 and 3). Only 6.1% of the study population had normal histological findings. CONCLUSION: The finding that a relatively large percentage of high-grade lesions might have been masked for anything up to a decade by a low-grade phenotype, coupled with the worrying percentage of defaulters from follow-up, indicate that an early decision for intervention (diagnostic and/or therapeutic) may be appropriate if a low-grade abnormality persists after a short surveillance period.

Adolescent↗