Topac V, Stoicu-Tivadar V
Vasile Topac, Faculty of Automation and Computers, 2 V. Pârvan blvd., 300223 Timişoara, Romania, E-mail:
Methods Inf Med. 2013;52(5):454-62. doi: 10.3414/ME12-02-0006. Epub 2013 Sep 27.
Patient empowerment is important in order to increase the quality of medical care and the life quality of the patients. An important obstacle for empowering patients is the language barrier the lay patient encounter when accessing medical information.
To design and develop a service that will help increase the understanding of medical language for lay persons.
The service identifies and explains medical terminology from a given text by annotating the terms in the original text with the definition. It is based on an original terminology interpretation engine that uses a fuzzy matching dictionary. The service was implemented in two projects: a) into the server of a tele-care system (TELEASIS) with the purpose of adapting medical text assigned by medical personnel for the assisted patients. b) Into a dedicated web site that can adapt the medical language from raw text or from existing web pages.
The output of the service was evaluated by a group of persons, and the results indicate that such a system can increase the understanding of medical texts. Several design decisions were driven from the evaluation, and are being considered for future development. Other tests measuring accuracy and time performance for the fuzzy terminology recognition have been performed. Test results revealed good performance for accuracy and excellent results regarding time performance.
The current version of the service increases the accessibility of medical language by explaining terminology with a good accuracy, while allowing the user to easily identify errors, in order to reduce the risk of incorrect terminology recognition.
患者赋权对于提高医疗质量和患者生活质量至关重要。患者赋权的一个重要障碍是普通患者在获取医疗信息时遇到的语言障碍。
设计并开发一项有助于提高普通民众对医学语言理解的服务。
该服务通过在原文中对术语进行定义注释来识别和解释给定文本中的医学术语。它基于一个使用模糊匹配字典的原始术语解释引擎。该服务在两个项目中得以实现：a）应用于远程护理系统（TELEASIS）的服务器，目的是使医务人员分配给受助患者的医学文本更易理解。b）应用于一个专用网站，该网站能够对原始文本或现有网页中的医学语言进行调整。
一组人员对该服务的输出进行了评估，结果表明这样的系统能够提高对医学文本的理解。评估推动了若干设计决策的制定，并正考虑用于未来的开发。还进行了其他一些测量模糊术语识别准确性和时间性能的测试。测试结果显示准确性表现良好，时间性能方面结果优异。
该服务的当前版本通过准确解释术语，提高了医学语言的可及性，同时允许用户轻松识别错误，以降低术语识别错误的风险。
