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PERSIVAL will use Columbia-Presbyterian's extensive on-line medical archives as a model of the kind of sophisticated information that patients need to find. The system is to be tested in the clinical setting of Columbia-Presbyterian's Heart Failure Center, and with outpatients at the medical center's Milstein Patient Library. Such real-world evaluations will enable researchers to design effective user interfaces and decide what kinds of information should be provided in information summaries.
"We believe improved patient access to the Internet can improve the overall quality of health care, helping doctors avoid missed diagnoses, choose effective diagnostic tests and medical interventions, and minimize possible complications," said James Cimino, assistant professor of medicine and medical informatics at Columbia's College of Physicians & Surgeons.
Professor McKeown, who has worked extensively in natural language processing and text summarization, will serve as overall project director and will oversee project development. Professor Cimino, who specializes in patient access to clinical information through on-line information services, will supervise clinical infrastructure. Judith Klavans, director of Columbia's Center for Research in Information Access, who conducts research in computational linguistics and natural language processing, will coordinate relations with industrial partners. Desmond Jordan, associate professor of clinical anesthesiology, who works as a cardiac anesthesiologist, will assist researchers in testing the system in the Heart Failure Center.
PERSIVAL is an interdisciplinary project and will involve researchers from Columbia's Departments of Computer Science, Medical Informatics, Electrical Engineering and Anesthesiology, and from its Center for Research on Information Access. These researchers will work in concert with librarians, both from the Health Sciences Libraries and from the central Columbia Libraries, to develop and categorize the collection of patient records.
Shih-fu Chang, associate professor of electrical engineering, has developed a series of tools that search for images and videos. Steve Feiner, associate professor of computer science, works in the field of graphical user interfaces, especially with virtual worlds systems. Luis Gravano, assistant professor of computer science, is an expert in database searches, and has created several protocols for Internet searches and retrievals. Vasilis Hatzivassiloglou, associate research scientist, will apply his expertise in statistical text analysis to categorize documents and extract information.
Carol Friedman, assistant adjunct professor of medical informatics, has used natural language text processing to find ways to make clinical data accessible to other automated procedures. Justin Starren, assistant professor of medical informatics and radiology, will contribute expertise in spoken language interfaces to medical systems. Vimla Patel, professor of medicine at McGill University, will lead the evaluation of all system components.
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