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Researchers at Columbia University have been awarded a $5 million National Science Foundation grant to create a sophisticated system that will use the unique features of a patient's medical history to help doctors and patients find and understand relevant on-line medical information.
The University was one of eight universities, of some 240 applicants, that won major awards in the NSF's most recent Digital Libraries Initiative competition, which invites university consortia to formulate proposals to develop technology that will allow people to use distributed electronic information - such as the Internet or multimedia archives - in meaningful ways.
Columbia also has recruited industry partners, including Bell Atlantic Corporation, General Electric Company, IBM, Intel Corporation and Lucent Technologies, which have pledged more than $2 million in hardware, software, content, and researcher time to develop and test the medical search tools. The University is to provide $1.5 million in matching funds, from the Office of the Provost, the Department of Medical Informatics at the College of Physicians & Surgeons and the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.
"Medical information can be complex, contradictory and often unreliable, and is sometimes beyond the understanding of the average lay patient," said Kathleen McKeown, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science.
"Our researchers are bringing diverse expertise to this project to create software that will make medical information more accessible. The end product will summarize relevant information from many texts and put that information in easy-to-understand terms. It will also summarize multimedia information, such as education videos, that are often overlooked as a source of reliable information."
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