Summarization from Medical Documents: A Survey <s> E-mailed reports <s> The specification discloses a luggage carrier made up of a generally U-shaped frame. The frame has two spaced legs with a hook on the front which hooks over the bumper of an automobile. Two braces are attached to the cross member of the U-shaped member and the front portion of the braces is received on fastening means welded to the under side of the car frame. The cross members provide a supporting surface for carrying articles, boats and the like. A platform may be supported on the frame. <s> BIB001 </s> Summarization from Medical Documents: A Survey <s> E-mailed reports <s> The MiTAP (MITRE Text and Audio Processing) system [13] is a prototype for monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and other global threats. MiTAP focuses on providing timely, multi-lingual, global information access to analysts, medical experts and individuals involved in humanitarian assistance and relief work. Multiple information sources in multiple languages are automatically captured, filtered, translated, summarized, and categorized into searchable newsgroups. Critical information is automatically extracted and tagged to facilitate browsing, searching, and sorting. ::: ::: The demonstration highlights how different users cull different kinds of information from the MiTAP system. Some use it in order to track disease outbreak; others have been using it to monitor economic and political situations worldwide. <s> BIB002
With the advent of the Web, several web-based services, whose purpose is the exchange of opinions and news, have emerged. For example, ProMED-mail 11 is a public free service, which promotes the exchange of news concerning bursts of epidemics. Other non-free services, such as MDLinx BIB001 , provide physicians and researchers with the opportunity to subscribe and receive alerts concerning new findings on their specialty fields, described in journal articles. The use of e-mailed reports for a fast dissemination of epidemiological information by the Internet shows an increasing success for monitoring epidemiological events  . The descriptive possibilities of these reports and their ability to deal with unattended situations make them competitive for reporting emerging infectious disease outbreaks and unusual disease patterns, including biological threats. However, as BIB002 note, analysts cannot feasibly acquire, manage, and digest the vast amount of information available through emailed reports or other information sources 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition, access to foreign language documents as well as the local news of other countries is generally limited. Even when foreign language news is available, it is usually no longer current by the time it gets translated and reaches the hands of an analyst. This very real problem raises an urgent need for the development of automated support for global tracking of infectious disease outbreaks and emerging biological threats. ProMED-mail is a service monitoring news on infection disease outbreaks around the world, seven days a week. By providing early warning of outbreaks of emerging and re-emerging diseases, ProMED aims at enabling public health precautions at all levels in a timely manner to prevent epidemic transmission and to save lives. ProMED sources of information include -among others-media reports, official reports, online summaries, local observers. Reports are also contributed by ProMED-mail subscribers. A team of expert moderators investigate reports before posting them to the network. Reports are distributed by e-mail to subscribers and posted on the ProMED-mail web site. ProMED-mail currently reaches over 30,000 subscribers in 150 countries. ProMED-mail is also available, apart from English, in Portuguese and in Spanish. Both of these lists cover disease news and topics relevant to Portuguese-and Spanish-speaking countries, respectively. E-mailed reports for monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and emerging biological threats represent a different type of medical documents. Such reports may contain apart from raw text, various types of information in attached files. The fact that these reports may be in several languages or may point to other sources, such as local news, makes the summarization task even more difficult. A sublanguage analysis may also be necessary for these types of documents since they often follow a specific writing style and structure. Medical terminology should also be taken into account, as it is the case in the other document types, exploiting existing medical resources for the specific diseases or biological threats.