Improving information retrieval using Medical Subject Headings Concepts: a test case on rare and chronic diseases.

Background: As more scientific work is published, it is important to improve access to the biomedical literature. Since 2000, when Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) Concepts were introduced, the MeSH Thesaurus has been concept based. Nevertheless, information retrieval is still performed at the MeSH Descriptor or Supplementary Concept level.

Performance evaluation of Unified Medical Language System®'s synonyms expansion to query PubMed.

Background: PubMed is the main access to medical literature on the Internet. In order to enhance the performance of its information retrieval tools, primarily non-indexed citations, the authors propose a method: expanding users' queries using Unified Medical Language System' (UMLS) synonyms i.e.

Evaluation of multi-terminology super-concepts for information retrieval.

Background: Following a recent change in the indexing policy for French quality controlled health gateway CISMeF, multiple terminologies are now being used for indexing in addition to MeSH®.

Objective: To evaluate precision and recall of super-concepts for information retrieval in a multi-terminology paradigm compared to MeSH-only.

Methods: We evaluate the relevance of resources retrieved by multi-terminology super-concepts and MeSH-only super-concepts queries.

Health multi-terminology portal: a semantic added-value for patient safety.

Since the mid-90s, several quality-controlled health gateways were developed. In France, CISMeF is the leading health gateway. It indexes Internet resources from the main institutions, using the MeSH thesaurus and the Dublin Core metadata element set.

[Searching French institutional health information sources: catalogue and index of French-language medical sites (CISMeF)].

The Catalogue and index of French-language medical sites (CISMeF) is a medical portal that provides users with results as pertinent as possible according to their requirements, expectations, and context of use. Indexing and single-term research are based on theMedical subject headings(MeSH) thesaurus. The integration of new medical terminology for indexing the catalogue's resources is intended to minimize false-negatives during searches and to contextualize the users' needs.

Optimization of the PubMed Automatic Term Mapping.

PubMed, freely available on the internet, is the best known database for medical information. We propose a method of optimization of the PubMed Automatic Term Mapping (ATM) that includes MeSH terms. This method is evaluated using two queries constructed to emphasize the differences between the PubMed queries as they are at present and also between these queries and the optimized one.

[Quality and use of websites presenting public health education and training opportunities].

The objective of this work was to study the use of the Internet and the quality of the websites for postgraduate public health courses in France, and to compare them with equivalent courses in the United States of America. Between June 2004 and January 2005, the authorized public health diplomas proposed in France and in the United States were inventoried and listed, and then all websites of these public health diplomas were systematically visited and reviewed using a standardized questionnaire. In France, 36 public health courses (7 post graduate diplomas [DEA], 13 Masters degrees [DESS] and 16 masters of public health [MPH]) were identified and selected from 53 websites.

French MeSH Browser: a cross-language tool to access MEDLINE/PubMed.

When searching the medical literature, health professionals and lay people strongly prefer to use their native language. Therefore, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) translations would be helpful to those who are not fluent in English to access scientific papers indexed in the MEDLINE bibliographic database. Furthermore, medical terminologies such as MeSH are challenging in any language.

Evaluation of meta-concepts for information retrieval in a quality-controlled health gateway.

Background: CISMeF is a French quality-controlled health gateway that uses the MeSH thesaurus. We introduced two new concepts, metaterms (medical specialty which has semantic links with one or more MeSH terms, subheadings and resource types) and resource types.

Objective: Evaluate precision and recall of metaterms.

A method of cross-lingual consumer health information retrieval.

Objectives: This paper presents a method of cross-language information retrieval aiming to make medical information available to patients in French and English, regardless of the query language they wish to use.

Methods: We describe the two MeSH-related terminologies used in this work. We show that the French patient synonyms included in CISMeF can be automatically mapped to the English consumer-oriented health topics used in MEDLINEplus, via the MeSH thesaurus.

Strategies for health information retrieval.

Background: The amount of health data accessible on the Web is increasing and Internet has become a major source of health information. Many tools and search engines are available but medical information retrieval remains difficult for both the health professional and the patients.

Objective: In this paper we describe heuristics that aim at matching as much as possible queries with the content of the documents in the context of the CISMeF catalogue (Catalogue and Index of Health Resources in French) and its Doc'CISMeF search tool.

A web-based teaching resource to prepare for final undergraduate examination: a French pilot study.

Access to accurate and quality-controlled health information on the Internet for medical students is not an easy task. CISMeF is the search tool of a MeSH-indexed directory of medical Internet resources in French. Since 2004, a new French Pre-Residency Examination (PRE) is compulsory for all medical students in the 6th year of the curriculum.

An introduction to the Semantic Web for health sciences librarians.

Objectives: The paper (1) introduces health sciences librarians to the main concepts and principles of the Semantic Web (SW) and (2) briefly reviews a number of projects on the handling of biomedical information that uses SW technology.

Methodology: The paper is structured into two main parts. "Semantic Web Technology" provides a high-level description, with examples, of the main standards and concepts: extensible markup language (XML), Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema (RDFS), ontologies, and their utility in information retrieval, concluding with mention of more advanced SW languages and their characteristics.

Enhancing the MeSH thesaurus to retrieve French online health resources in a quality-controlled gateway.

The amount of health information available on the Internet is considerable. In this context, several health gateways have been developed. Among them, CISMeF (Catalogue and Index of Health Resources in French) was designed to catalogue and index health resources in French.

Webmastering in academic institutions: a new job opportunity.

In cyberspace, the health webmaster could be regarded as a virtual editor-in-chief, in charge of content and design. In this circumstance, he/she must follow quality criteria when building any resource. At the Rouen University Hospital (RUH), we have chosen "Net Scoring" as an effective tool to aid the design of a quality Web site.

Using CISMeF MeSH "Encapsulated" terminology and a categorization algorithm for health resources.

Introduction: CISMeF is a Quality Controlled Health Gateway using a terminology based on the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus that displays medical specialties (metaterms) and the relationships existing between them and MeSH terms.

Objective: The need to classify the resources within the catalogue has led us to combine this type of semantic information with domain expert knowledge for health resources categorization purposes.

Material And Methods: A two-step categorization process consisting of mapping resource keywords to CISMeF metaterms and ranking metaterms by decreasing coverage in the resource has been developed.

UMLF: a Unified Medical Lexicon for French.

Lexical resources for medical language, such as lists of words with inflectional and derivational information, are publicly available for the English lantuate with the UMLS Specialist Lexicon. The goal of the UMLF project is to pool and unify existing resources and to add extensively to them by exploiting medical terminologies and corpora, resulting in a Unified Medical Lexicon for French. We present here the current status of the project.

Metadata element set in a quality-controlled subject gateway: a step to a health semantic Web.

Background: Quality-controlled subject gateways are Internet services which apply a selected set of targeted measures to support systematic resource discovery. Considerable manual effort is used to process a selection of resources which meet quality criteria and to display a extensive description and indexing of these resources with standards-based metadata.

Objective: Several metadata element sets are proposed to describe, index and quality health resources to be included in a French quality-controlled health gateway called CISMeF.

Modelisation of consumer health information in a quality-controlled gateway.

The amount of health data accessible on the Web is increasing and Internet has become a major source of health information. Many tools and search engines are available but medical information retrieval remains difficult for both the health professional and the patients. In this paper we describe CISMeF-patients.

Towards a unified medical lexicon for French.

Medical Informatics has a constant need for basic Medical Language Processing tasks, e.g., for coding into controlled vocabularies, free text indexing and information retrieval.