Term-based extraction of medical information: Pre-operative patient education use case

Abstract

The processing of medical information is not a trivial task for medical non-experts. The paper presents an artificial assistant designed to facilitate a reliable access to medical online contents. Interactions are modelled as doctor-patient Question Answering sessions within a preoperative patient education scenario where the system addresses patient's information needs explaining medical events and procedures. This implies an accurate medical information extraction from and reasoning with available medical knowledge and large amounts of unstructured multilingual online data. Bridging the gap between medical knowledge and data, we explore a language-agnostic approach to medical concepts mining from the standard terminologies, and the data-driven collection of the corresponding seed terms in a distant supervision setting for German. Experimenting with different terminologies, features and term matching strategies, we achieved a promising F-score of 0.91 on the medical term extraction task. The concepts and terms are used to search and retrieve definitions from the verified online free resources. The proof-of-concept definition retrieval system is designed and evaluated showing promising results, acceptable by humans in 92% of cases.