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Select one of the available medical reports (and press submit)

Further information

Medical texts (reports, articles, etc.) are usually written by professionals (physicians, medical researchers, etc.) who use their own language and communication style. On the other hand, these texts are often read by health consumers (as in the case of medical reports) who do not have the same skills and vocabularies of the experts.

To help a health consumer in understanding a medical text, it would be desirable to have an automatic system that, given a text written with medical (technical) terms, translates them in simple/plain language and provides additional information with the same kind of language.

We have built a system, a SImplifier of Medical texts for Patients and Less Experts (SIMPLE), that processes online medical documents and provides health consumers with the needed information for their understanding. The system works as follows:

1. Takes an online medical text and finds and highlights the technical terms (words or combinations of words) by using a medical vocabulary (e.g. Unified Medical Language System - UMLS).
2. Translates the highlighted technical terms to non-technical, or plain, terms with a medical-consumer thesaurus (e.g., Consumer Health Vocabulary - CHV).
3. Finally, provides additional plain information with a health-consumer dictionary (e.g., WebMD).

By doing so, the user will have everything at hand by dealing with a single document that contains all the useful information for its understanding and also for learning on the subject.