Summary
Background: An increasing amount of health education resources for patients and professionals
are distributed via social media channels. For example, thousands of health education
videos are disseminated via You-Tube. Often, tags are assigned by the disseminator.
However, the lack of use of standardized terminologies in those tags and the presence
of misleading videos make it particularly hard to retrieve relevant videos.
Objectives: i) Identify the use of standardized medical thesauri (SNOMED CT) in You-Tube Health
videos tags from preselected YouTube Channels and demonstrate an information technology
(IT) architecture for treating the tags of these health (video) resources. ii) Investigate
the relative percentage of the tags used that relate to SNOMED CT terms. As such resources
may play a key role in educating professionals and patients, the use of standardized
vocabularies may facilitate the sharing of such resources. iii) Demonstrate how such
resources may be properly exploited within the new generation of semantically enriched
content or learning management systems that allow for knowledge expansion through
the use of linked medical data and numerous literature resources also described through
the same vocabularies.
Methods: We implemented a video portal integrating videos from 500 US Hospital channels. The
portal integrated 4,307 YouTube videos regarding surgery as described by 64,367 tags.
BioPortal REST services were used within our portal to match SNOMED CT terms with
YouTube tags by both exact match and non-exact match. The whole architecture was complemented
with a mechanism to enrich the retrieved video resources with other educational material
residing in other repositories by following contemporary semantic web advances, in
the form of Linked Open Data (LOD) principles.
Results: The average percentage of YouTube tags that were expressed using SNOMED CT terms
was about 22.5%, while one third of YouTube tags per video contained a SNOMED CT term
in a loose search; this analogy became one tenth in the case of exact match. Retrieved
videos were then linked further to other resources by using LOD compliant systems.
Such results were exemplified in the case of systems and technologies used in the
mEducator EC funded project.
Conclusion: YouTube Health videos can be searched for and retrieved using SNOMED CT terms with
a high possibility of identifying health videos that users want based on their search
criteria. Despite the fact that tagging of this information with SNOMED CT terms may
vary, its availability and linked data capacity opens the door to new studies for
personalized retrieval of content and linking with other knowledge through linked
medical data and semantic advances in (learning) content management systems.
Keywords
Heath video - tags - tag cloud - SNOMED CT - terms - Medical thesauri - linked data
- linked medical data - educational metadata - learn-ing/content management system
