English and Spanish oral cancer information on the internet: a pilot surface quality and content evaluation of oral cancer web sites.

Objective: Oral and pharyngeal cancers are responsible for over 7600 deaths each year in the United States. Given the significance of the disease and the fact that many individuals increasingly rely on health information on the Internet, it is important that patients and others can access clear and accurate oral cancer information on the Web. The objective of this study was threefold: (a) develop an initial method to evaluate surface and content quality of selected English- and Spanish-language oral cancer Web sites; (b) conduct a pilot evaluation; and (c) discuss implications of our findings for dental public health.

Methodology to develop and evaluate a semantic representation for NLP.

Natural language processing applications that extract information from text rely on semantic representations. The objective of this paper is to describe a methodology for creating a semantic representation for information that will be automatically extracted from textual clinical records. We illustrate two of the four steps of the methodology in this paper using the case study of encoding information from dictated dental exams: (1) develop an initial representation from a set of training documents and (2) iteratively evaluate and evolve the representation while developing annotation guidelines.

A preliminary comparison of speech recognition functionality in dental practice management systems.

In this study, we examined speech recognition functionality in four leading dental practice management systems. Twenty dental students used voice to chart a simulated patient with 18 findings in each system. Results show it can take over a minute to chart one finding and that users frequently have to repeat commands.

Quality assessment of English and Spanish oral cancer websites.

Based on the morbidity and mortality due to oral cancer, it is essential that oral cancer information available on the Internet be usable, organized and credible. We evaluated the information quality of 24 English-language and 25 Spanish-language oral cancer websites. English-language sites scored 74.