Summarization from Medical Documents: A Survey <s> The medical domain <s> A series of information retrieval experiments was carried out with a computer installed in a medical practice setting for relatively inexperienced physician end-users. Using a commercial MEDLINE product based on the vector space model, these physicians searched just as effectively as more experienced searchers using Boolean searching. The results of this experiment were subsequently used to create a new large medical test collection, which was used in experiments with the SMART retrieval system to obtain baseline performance data as well as compare SMART with the other searchers. <s> BIB001 </s> Summarization from Medical Documents: A Survey <s> The medical domain <s> This article addresses the special features of data mining with medical data. Researchers in other fields may not be aware of the particular constraints and difficulties of the privacy-sensitive, heterogeneous, but voluminous data of medicine. Ethical and legal aspects of medical data mining are discussed, including data ownership, fear of lawsuits, expected benefits, and special administrative issues. The mathematical understanding of estimation and hypothesis formation in medical data may be fundamentally different than those from other data collection activities. Medicine is primarily directed at patient-care activity, and only secondarily as a research resource; almost the only justification for collecting medical data is to benefit the individual patient. Finally, medical data have a special status based upon their applicability to all people; their urgency (including life-or-death); and a moral obligation to be used for beneficial purposes. <s> BIB002
Medical Informatics represents the core theories, concepts and techniques of information applications in medicine. It involves four different levels depending on the focus from the cell to the population BIB001 : • Bioinformatics concerns molecular and cellular processes, such as gene sequences; • Imaging informatics concerns tissues and organs, such as radiology imaging systems; • Clinical informatics concerns clinicians and patients, involving applications of various clinical specialties; • Public health informatics concerns populations involving applications such as the disease surveillance systems Medical information distributed through all the above levels concerns various document types: scientific articles, electronic medical records, semi-structured databases, web documents, e-mailed reports, Xrays images, videos. The characteristics of each document type have to be taken into account in the development of a summarization system. Scientific articles are mainly composed of text and, in several cases, they have a sectioning that can be exploited by a summarization system. Electronic medical records contain structured data, apart from free text. Web documents may appear in health directories and catalogs, which need to be searched first in order to locate the interesting web pages. The web pages layout is also another factor that needs to be taken into account. E-mailed reports are mainly free text without any other structure. X-rays images, videos such as echocardiograms, represent a completely different document type, where text may not be included at all or may be a part of an image. Compared to other domains, medical documents have certain unique characteristics that make very challenging and attractive their analysis. Uniqueness of medical documents is due to their volume, their heterogeneity, as well as due to the fact that they are the most rewarding documents to analyze, especially those concerning human medical information due to the expected social benefits (see BIB002 ).