Search results for " Consumer Health Vocabulary"

Design, development and validation of a system for automatic help to medical text understanding

2020

Abstract Objective The paper presents a web-based application, SIMPLE, that facilitates medical text comprehension by identifying the health-related terms of a medical text and providing the corresponding consumer terms and explanations. Background The comprehension of a medical text is often a difficult task for laypeople because it requires semantic abilities that can differ from a person to another, depending on his/her health-literacy level. Some systems have been developed for facilitating the comprehension of medical texts through text simplification, either syntactical or lexical. The ones dealing with lexical simplification usually replace the original text and do not provide additi…

An Online Multilingual Medical Vocabulary/Thesaurus/Dictionary (MED-VTD) for Facilitating Understanding of Medical Texts

Medical texts (e.g., reports and medicine leaflets) are usually written by professionals (physicians, medical researchers, etc.) who use their own language and communication style. On the other hand, they are often read by health consumers or other medical professionals who do not have the same vocabularies and can have difficulties in text comprehension. Thus, to help a generic user in understanding a medical text, it would be desirable to have an online medical vocabulary/thesaurus/dictionary that he/she can easily look for finding the plain equivalent of any medical (technical) term and a definition of the term with the same kind of language. In this work, we present an online multilingu…

U-MedSearch: A Meta Search Engine of Medical Content for Different Users and Learning Needs

2015

More and more people use Internet to look for medical information for understanding and learning but different users, such as experts (e.g., physicians) and consumers (e.g., patients), have different needs and bring different levels of reading ability and prior knowledge. Generic and specific search engines and specialized health sites either do not exploit the whole web or overload users with information of different nature. On the contrary, it is important for a user to immediately find the information on the topic being explored that has the 'right' amount of information and level of complexity. This paper presents a meta search engine of medical information on the web, U-MedSearch, that…

Finding the best web medical content for different learner categories

2015

In the age of Internet where any kind of information can be easily found online, it is becoming increasingly evident that more and more people use the World Wide Web to seek health and medical information for understanding and learning. Different users have diverse needs, even when searching for the same topic. This is certainly true in healthcare, where a patient, a physician or a health executive might look for information on the same topic but have different necessities and bring different levels of reading ability and prior knowledge together with a different vocabulary. Generic search engines (like Google, Bing or Yahoo) work on the whole web but make generic searches often overloading…

An automatic system for helping health consumers to understand medical texts

2015

Medical texts (reports, articles, etc.) are usually written by professionals (physicians, medical researchers, etc.) who use their own language and communication style. On the other hand, these texts are often read by health consumers (as in the case of medical reports) who do not have the same skills and vocabularies of the experts and can have difficulties in text comprehension. To help a health consumer in understanding a medical text, it would be desirable to have an automatic system that, given a text written with medical (technical) terms, translates them in simple or plain language and provides additional information with the same kind of language. We have designed such a system. It …