Capturing and Relating Multilingual Clinical Cases

Recent studies reveal that the Internet use has grown tremendously in the past few years, most rapidly in non-English-speaking regions. However, this scenario creates a demand for innovative information retrieval services to better support a world wide community. This paper presents the MedLink linking service, which automatically identifies semantic relationships among multilingual clinical cases and makes them available to users as hyperlinks. As a proof of concept, we also present an experiment relating multilingual clinical cases in Ophthalmology, where the relationships created by MedLink were qualitatively analyzed by a Faculty with strong Ophthalmology background. Analysis results are described in terms of the completeness and the fidelity of the relationships created, which can be most useful in a globalized world for several purposes including research, teaching, and presurgical decision making.