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| Vol.25, No. 05 | Oct. 1, 1999 |
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| Vol.25, No. 05 | Oct. 1, 1999 |
Researchers at Columbia 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 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," she continued, "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."
Tools such as those to be developed at Columbia are expected to help both patients and physicians find reliable health advice that may be a few keystrokes away. The easy accessibility of medical information on-line already is changing the nature of the doctor-patient relationship.
Doctors report they no longer need to spend as much time educating patients about their condition, and people afflicted with rare or unusual diseases have been able to locate information on novel therapies unknown to their physicians. But some medical information on the Internet is not peer-reviewed, or is actually wrong.
The Columbia project, Personalized Retrieval and Summarization of Image, Video and Language Resources, or PERSIVAL, will create software that will use information from patient records as input for an Internet search.
The software will summarize the literature it finds so users can avoid reading many documents. PERSIVAL will use the source of the information—medical association, medical journal, popular magazine, self-help group—to judge its reliability. The software will incorporate language generation techniques that will select everyday English terms, rather than arcane medical language.
Researchers are assembling a collection of thousands of medical videos—educational materials intended for patients, instructional materials for doctors and diagnostic materials, such as sonograms or echocardiograms —to test PERSIVAL's video search and summary capabilities. The collection, which is to reside at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, will allow patients to match videos of their diagnostic tests with those of normal and abnormal cases, comparing diagnoses.
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 the College of Physicians & Surgeons.
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.