Title: Dynamic generation of a Health Topics Overview from consumer health information documents

Authors: Trudi Miller, Gondy Leroy

Addresses: School of Information Systems and Technology, Claremont Graduate University, 130 E. Ninth Street, Claremont, CA 91711, USA. ' School of Information Systems and Technology, Claremont Graduate University, 130 E. Ninth Street, Claremont, CA 91711, USA

Abstract: Online health information use is increasing, but can be too difficult for consumers. We created a system that dynamically generates a health topics overview for consumer health web pages that organises the information into four consumer-preferred categories while displaying topic prevalence through visualisation. It accesses both a consumer health vocabulary and the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). We evaluated its ability by calculating precision, recall, and F-score for phrase extraction and categorisation. We tested pages from three different consumer web sites. Overall, precision is 82%, recall is 75%, and F-score is 78%, and precision between sites did not significantly differ.

Keywords: consumer health informatics; information technology; information systems; natural language processing; text visualisation; Unified Medical Language System; UMLS; health topics overview; health web pages; online health information; e-healthcare; electronic healthcare; visualisation; health websites; internet.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBET.2008.020069

International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, 2008 Vol.1 No.4, pp.395 - 414

Published online: 25 Aug 2008 *

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