WRAPIN
(Worldwide online Reliable Advice to Patients and Individuals)
Gaudinat A., Boyer C.
The Health On the Net Foundation, Switzerland, www.hon.ch
Keywords: Biomedical informatics, eHealth networks and architectures, health professionals knowledge, public health, health promotion, information to citizens, security and privacy.
Objectives:
WRAPIN stands for Worldwide online Reliable Advice to Patients and Individuals.
WRAPIN, a two year European project (IST-2001-33260) helps solve two
major problems faced by Internet citizens: Finding information among
a large number of potentially useful documents; Evaluating the relevance
of an online medical document. Despite the improved access to information
made possible by the Internet, it remains extremely difficult to judge
the trustworthiness or relevance of online content. All categories of
users, professional and non-professional, face this problem, which can
be of critical importance in the case of health or medical information.
Search engines, some general, some specialized, are used by all categories
of users to find information but the ever-increasing number of online
documents means that queries must be ever more precise.
WRAPIN involves six partners, leaders in their respective fields; HON,
THALES Information Systems, the Medical Informatics Division of the
University Hospitals of Geneva, Nice Computing, LERTIM of the Faculty
of Medicine of the Hôpital de la Timone and the Ministry of Health
and social actions (MISS).
WRAPIN is an ambitious project aiming to support the online citizen with a practical, convenient solution to the problem of large numbers of documents of uncertain quality. WRAPIN will offer a modular platform to interconnect the most trustworthy and complete information sources. To date, the following databases have been integrated in WRAPIN:
" MEDLINE, containing scientific medical articles from the 1960's
through the present and constantly updated;
" Clinical Trials (clinicaltrials.org);
" OESO (new electronic database prepared by WRAPIN for the World
Organization for Special Studies on Diseases of Oesophagus;
" Urofrance (French urology database);
" MedHunt (medical search engine) and
" the HON Code of Conduct (http://www.hon.ch/Conduct.html) accredited
Web sites.
" the HONnews daily news from HON and HealthDay
" Drug Information from the Drug and Food Administration (FDA)
The resulting search tool will provide citizens with a wide range of trustworthy medical and health content.
Results:
The WRAPIN project makes use of new developments in the mapping of medical
terms, indexing and search technologies, and natural language processing
tools. WRAPIN has also incorporated and stimulated progress on ongoing
projects, such as MARVIN (Multi-Agent Retrieval Vagabond on Information
Network, HON's medical web spider), HONselect (the 'categorizer' which
currently provides a directory of health/medical resources), ARIANE
(the 'query conceptualizer' from LERTIM), and a 12-language spelling
corrector. WRAPIN will use these technologies to help in query formulation,
leading to accurate search results.
WRAPIN will also provide an entirely new facility enabling the comparison of health/medical documents in any format (HTML, PDF, etc.) or length with this interconnected knowledge base, to discover if the information exists in the published literature and provide a summary conclusion of the ideas contained. It will help to determine the reliability of documents by checking the ideas contained against established benchmarks, and enable users to determine the relevance of a given document from a page of search results. This exciting new tool is an important step toward the certification of quality online information.
Acknowledgements
The WRAPIN (Worldwide online Reliable Advice to Patients and Individuals)
project, IST-2001-33260, is supported by the European Commission and
the "Office Fédéral de l'Education et la Science"
(OFES, Switzerland).
The authors wish to thank all the WRAPIN members, with their precious
contribution in this ambitious project; HUG - SIM Service of Medical
Informatics - University Hospitals of Geneva [11], LERTIM Laboratoire
d'Enseignement et de Recherche sur le Traitement de l'information Médical
[12], MISS Mission pour l'informatisation du système de santé
[13], NICE Computing [14], THALES Information Systems [15] and XRPartner
[16].
References:
[1] Clinical Trials : www.clinicaltrials.gov
[2] Drug FDA: www.fda.gov/cder/drug/default.htm
[3] Ruch P, Gaudinat A. Combining regular variation and nearest neighbors
for efficient mapping to indexing terms. Romand 2002, Frascati.The 2nd
Workshop on Robust Methods in Analysis of Naturallanguage Data, 72-79,
July 2002.
[4] Gaudinat A, Boyer C. Automatic Extraction of MeSH terms from MEDLINEs
Abstracts. Workshop on Natural Language Processing in Biomedical Applications,
NLPBA2002: 53-57.
[5] Gaudinat A, Joubert M, PhD, Aymard S, Falco L, Boyer C, Fieschi
M. Indexation et recherche d'information biomédicale : une nouvelle
approche intégrant les sources de connaissance UMLS à
l'extraction de termes MeSH. Xemes JOURNEES FRANCOPHONES D'INFORMATIQUE
MEDICALE 2003.
[6] HealthDay: www.healthday.com
[7] MedLine: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed
[8] Oeso, World Organisation for Specialized Studies on Diseases of
the Esophagus : www.oeso.org
[9] UroFrance, le site de l'Urologie française : www.urofrance.org
[10] WRAPIN: www.wrapin.org
[11] Service d'Informatique médicale: http://www.sim.hcuge.ch/
[12] LERTIM: http://cybertim.timone.univ-mrs.fr/cybertim
[13] MISS: http://www.emploi-solidarite.gouv.fr
[14] Nice Computing: http://www.nicecomputing.ch
[15] THALES IS: http://www.thalesgroup.com
[16] XRPartner: http://www.mediqual.net/