Department of Radiology, Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA, USA.
Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Intelligent Imaging Center, School of Medicine, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA.
J Digit Imaging. 2022 Jun;35(3):660-665. doi: 10.1007/s10278-022-00597-9. Epub 2022 Feb 15.
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of translation of RadLex lexicon from English to German performed by Google Translate, using the RadLex ontology as ground truth. The same comparison was also performed for German to English translations. We determined the concordance rate of the Google Translate-rendered translations (for both English to German and German to English translations) to the official German RadLex (translations provided by the German Radiological Society) and English RadLex terms via character-by-character concordance analysis (string matching). Specific term characteristics of term character count and word count were compared between concordant and discordant translations using t-tests. Google Translate-rendered translations originally considered incongruent (2482 English terms and 2500 German terms) were then reviewed by German and English-speaking radiologists to further evaluate clinical utility. Overall success rates of both methods were calculated by adding the percentage of terms marked correct by string comparison to the percentage marked correct during manual review extrapolated to the terms that had been initially marked incorrect during string analysis. 64,632 English and 47,425 German RadLex terms were analyzed. 3507 (5.4%) of the Google Translate-rendered English to German translations were concordant with the official German RadLex terms when evaluated via character-by-character concordance. 3288 (6.9%) of the Google Translate-rendered German to English translations matched the corresponding English RadLex terms. Human review of a random sample of non-concordant machine translations revealed that 95.5% of such English to German translations were understandable, whereas 43.9% of such German to English translations were understandable. Combining both string matching and human review resulted in an overall Google Translate success rate of 95.7% for English to German translations and 47.8% for German to English translations. For certain radiologic text translation tasks, Google Translate may be a useful tool for translating multi-language radiology reports into a common language for natural language processing and subsequent labeling of datasets for machine learning. Indeed, string matching analysis alone is an incomplete method for evaluating machine translation. However, when human review of automated translation is also incorporated, measured performance improves. Additional evaluation using longer text samples and full imaging reports is needed. An apparent discordance between English to German versus German to English translation suggests that the direction of translation affects accuracy.
本研究旨在评估使用 RadLex 本体作为事实依据，通过谷歌翻译将 RadLex 词汇从英文翻译为德文的可行性。同时，还对德译英和英译德的翻译进行了比较。我们通过逐字符一致性分析（字符串匹配）确定了谷歌翻译生成的翻译（英文到德文和德文到英文的翻译）与官方德文 RadLex（德国放射学会提供的翻译）和英文 RadLex 术语的一致性率。使用 t 检验比较了一致和不一致翻译之间特定术语特征（术语字符数和单词数）。然后，由德裔和英语裔放射科医生对最初认为不一致的谷歌翻译生成的翻译（2482 个英文术语和 2500 个德文术语）进行审查，以进一步评估其临床实用性。通过将字符串比较标记为正确的术语百分比添加到通过手动审查标记为正确的术语百分比，并将其外推到最初在字符串分析中标记为错误的术语，计算出这两种方法的总体成功率。分析了 64632 个英文和 47425 个德文 RadLex 术语。通过逐字符一致性评估，3507（5.4%）个谷歌翻译生成的英文到德文翻译与官方德文 RadLex 术语一致。3288（6.9%）个谷歌翻译生成的德文到英文翻译与相应的英文 RadLex 术语匹配。对非一致性机器翻译的随机样本进行人工审查显示，95.5%的此类英文到德文翻译是可理解的，而 43.9%的此类德文到英文翻译是可理解的。将字符串匹配和人工审查结合起来，谷歌翻译生成的英文到德文翻译的总体成功率为 95.7%，德文到英文翻译的成功率为 47.8%。对于某些放射学文本翻译任务，谷歌翻译可能是将多语言放射学报告翻译成自然语言处理和随后为机器学习标注数据集的常用语言的有用工具。实际上，仅使用字符串匹配分析是评估机器翻译的不完整方法。但是，当也纳入对自动化翻译的人工审查时，测量性能会提高。需要使用更长的文本样本和完整的成像报告进行进一步评估。英文到德文与德文到英文翻译之间的明显差异表明，翻译方向会影响准确性。
