Search

Introduction: Books and papers are the most relevant source of theoretical knowledge for medical education. New technologies of artificial intelligence can be designed to assist in selected educational tasks, such as reading a corpus made up of multiple documents and extracting relevant information in a quantitative way. Methods: Thirty experts were selected transparently using an online public call on the website of the sponsor organization and on its social media. Six books edited or co-edited by members of this panel containing a general knowledge of breast cancer or specific surgical knowledge have been acquired. This collection was used by a team of computer scientists to train an artificial neural network based on a technique called Word2Vec. Results: The corpus of six books contained about 2.2 billion words for 300d vectors. A few tests were performed. We evaluated cosine similarity between different words. Discussion: This work represents an initial attempt to derive formal information from textual corpus. It can be used to perform an augmented reading of the corpus of knowledge available in books and papers as part of a discipline. This can generate new hypothesis and provide an actual estimate of their association within the expert opinions. Word embedding can also be a good tool when used in accruing narrative information from clinical notes, reports, etc., and produce prediction about outcomes. More work is expected in this promising field to generate "real-world evidence." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Decisions in healthcare usually rely on the goodness and completeness of data that could be coupled with heuristics to improve the decision process itself. However, this is often an incomplete process. Structured interviews denominated Delphi surveys investigate experts' opinions and solve by consensus complex matters like those underlying surgical decision-making. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of study that combines computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics. NLP can then be used as a valuable help in building a correct context in surgical data, contributing to the amelioration of surgical decision-making. Results: We applied NLP coupled with machine learning approaches to predict the context (words) owning high accuracy from the words nearest to Delphi surveys, used as input. Conclusions: The proposed methodology has increased the usefulness of Delphi surveys favoring the extraction of keywords that can represent a specific clinical context. It permits the characterization of the clinical context suggesting words for the evaluation process of the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]