Summary
Background: 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.
Objectives: To design and develop a service that will help increase the understanding of medical
language for lay persons.
Methods: 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.
Result: 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.
Conclusion: 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.
Keywords
Terminology - language understanding - patient empowerment - NLP
