Capturing and Relating Multilingual Clinical Cases

Renato de Freitas Bulcão-Neto (Innolution Sistemas de Informatica, Brazil)

José Antonio Camacho Guerrero (Innolution Sistemas de Informatica, Brazil)

Paulo Schor (Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Brazil)

Alessandra Stanquini Lopes (Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Brazil)

Marcio Branquinho Dutra (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil)

Alessandra Alaniz Macedo (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil)

Abstract: Recent studies reveal that the Internet use has grown tremendously in the past few years, most rapidly in non-English-speaking regions. However, this scenario creates a demand for innovative information retrieval services to better support a world wide community. This paper presents the MedLink linking service, which automatically identifies semantic relationships among multilingual clinical cases and makes them available to users as hyperlinks. As a proof of concept, we also present an experiment relating multilingual clinical cases in Ophthalmology, where the relationships created by MedLink were qualitatively analyzed by a Faculty with strong Ophthalmology background. Analysis results are described in terms of the completeness and the fidelity of the relationships created, which can be most useful in a globalized world for several purposes including research, teaching, and presurgical decision making.

Keywords: cross-language information retrieval, medical informatics, multilingual Web, semantic relationships

Categories: H.3, H.4