Abstract
In the drive to improve patient safety, patients in modem intensive care units are closely monitored with the generation of very large volumes of data. Unless the data are further processed, it is difficult for medical and nursing staff to assimilate what is important. It has been demonstrated that data summarization in natural language has the potential to improve clinical decision making; we have implemented and evaluated a prototype system which generates such textual summaries automatically. Our evaluation of the computer generated summaries showed that the decisions made by medical and nursing staff after reading the summaries were as good as those made after viewing the currently available graphical presentations with the same information content. Since our automatically generated textual summaries can be improved by including additional content and expert knowledge, they promise to enhance information exchange between the medical and nursing staff, particularly when integrated with the currently available graphical presentations. The main feature of this technology is that it brings together a diverse set of techniques such as medical signal analysis, knowledge based reasoning, medical ontology and natural language generation. In this paper we discuss the main components of our approach with a critical analysis of their strengths and limitations and present options for improvement to address these limitations.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | ECAI 2008 |
Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence |
Editors | Malik Ghallab, Constantine D. Spyropoulos, Nikos Fakotakis, Nikos Avouris |
Place of Publication | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
Publisher | IOS Press |
Pages | 678-682 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Volume | 178 |
ISBN (Print) | 1586038915, 978-1586038915 |
Publication status | Published - 31 Jul 2008 |
Event | 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2008) - Patras, Greece Duration: 21 Jul 2008 → 25 Jul 2008 |
Conference
Conference | 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2008) |
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Country/Territory | Greece |
City | Patras |
Period | 21/07/08 → 25/07/08 |