Integrating Wikipedia Articles and Images into an Information Resource for Radiology Patients

Abstract

Wikipedia—an open-access online encyclopedia—contains a large number of medically relevant articles and images that may help supplement glossaries of radiology terms. We sought to determine the extent to which concepts from a large online radiology glossary developed as part of the Patient-Oriented Radiology Reporter (PORTER) initiative could be mapped to relevant Wikipedia web pages and images using automated or semi-automated approaches. The glossary included 4090 concepts with their definitions; the concept’s preferred name and lexical variants, such as plurals, adjectival forms, synonyms, and abbreviations, yielded a total of 13,030 terms. Of the 4090 concepts, 3063 (74.9%) had a corresponding English-language Wikipedia page identified by automated search with subsequent manual review. We applied the MediaWiki application programming interface (API) to generate web-service calls to identify the images from each concept’s corresponding Wikipedia page; three reviewers selected relevant images to associate with the glossary’s concepts. Licensing terms for the images were reviewed. For 800 randomly sampled concepts that had associated Wikipedia pages, 362 distinct images were identified from the MediaWiki library and matched to 404 concepts (51%). Three images (1%) had unspecified licensing terms; the rest were in the public domain or available via a Creative Commons license. Wikipedia and the MediaWiki library offer a large collection of medical articles and images that can be incorporated into an online lay-language glossary of radiology terms though a semi-automated approach.