CiteULike: Gaetan Kim

MedEvi: Retrieving textual evidence of relations between biomedical concepts from Medline.

Jung-Jae Kim — 2008-04-11T13:37:51-00:00

Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) (9 April 2008)

SUMMARY: Search engines running on MEDLINE abstracts have been widely used by biologists to find publications that are related to their research. The existing search engines such as PubMed, however, have limitations when applied for the task of seeking textual evidence of relations between given concepts. The limitations are mainly due to the problem that the search engines do not effectively deal with multi-term queries which may imply semantic relations between the terms. To address this problem, we present MedEvi, a novel search engine that imposes positional restriction on occurrences matching multi-term queries, based on the observation that terms with semantic relations which are explicitly stated in text are not found too far from each other. MedEvi further identifies additional keywords of biological and statistical significance from local context of matching occurrences in order to help users reformulate their queries for better results. AVAILABILITY: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/tc-test/textmining/medevi/ CONTACT: kim@ebi.ac.uk, pezik@ebi.ac.uk.

Using MEDLINE as a knowledge source for disambiguating abbreviations and acronyms in full-text biomedical journal articles.

Hong Yu — 2006-08-29T20:45:49-00:00

J Biomed Inform (7 June 2006)

Biomedical abbreviations and acronyms are widely used in biomedical literature. Since many of them represent important content in biomedical literature, information retrieval and extraction benefits from identifying the meanings of those terms. On the other hand, many abbreviations and acronyms are ambiguous, it would be important to map them to their full forms, which ultimately represent the meanings of the abbreviations. In this study, we present a semi-supervised method that applies MEDLINE as a knowledge source for disambiguating abbreviations and acronyms in full-text biomedical journal articles. We first automatically generated from the MEDLINE abstracts a dictionary of abbreviation-full pairs based on a rule-based system that maps abbreviations to full forms when full forms are defined in the abstracts. We then trained on the MEDLINE abstracts and predicted the full forms of abbreviations in full-text journal articles by applying supervised machine-learning algorithms in a semi-supervised fashion. We report up to 92% prediction precision and up to 91% coverage.

Patients' attitudes toward internet cancer support groups.

EO Im — 2007-09-10T08:41:36-00:00

Oncol Nurs Forum, Vol. 34, No. 3. (May 2007), pp. 705-712.

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES: To explore patients' attitudes toward Internet cancer support groups (ICSGs) through an online forum. RESEARCH APPROACH: Qualitative study using a feminist perspective. SETTING: Internet and real settings. PARTICIPANTS: 16 patients with cancer. METHODOLOGIC APPROACH: An online forum was held for one month with six discussion topics. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis. MAIN RESEARCH VARIABLES: Attitudes toward ICSGs. FINDINGS: Through the data-analysis process, four themes were found related to patients' attitudes toward ICSGs. First, the participants universalized patients' needs for and attitudes toward ICSGs. Second, most of the participants wanted to use ICSGs for emotional support, information, and interactions. Third, many of the participants used ICSGs because they could reach out to other patients with cancer without traveling and without interrupting their busy schedules. Finally, many participants were concerned about the security of interactions on ICSGs, so they wanted ICSGs that could ensure privacy and safeguard the anonymity and confidentiality of what they shared online. CONCLUSIONS: Patients view ICSGs positively. Additional studies should examine gender-specific and multilanguage ICSGs by recruiting more ethnic minority patients. INTERPRETATION: Despite concerns about the security of Internet interactions, ICSGs would be an excellent source of social support that is acceptable to patients with cancer.