MapFace

It is a complex but very important task to formalize a clinical practice guideline and model it into a representation that can be executed and utilized automatically, since the automatic execution of guidelines at the point-of-care ensures the best available scientic evidence without interrupting clinical work ow. Before a medical text can be translated into such a model, it is necessary to pre-process the text, so that its contents, i. e. the existing medical concepts, can be identied and described unambiguously in order to ensure a correct interpretation.

Semantic Annotation Systems extract medical concepts from the text of guidelines and map them to concepts from medical terminologies, such as the UMLS®Metathesaurus®[36], which contain important additional information. Due to the ambiguity of free text, the correct and automatic identication of medical concepts and the corresponding mapping generated with the help of these systems will probably never be completely correct. Since medical care is an extremely sensitive discipline, the complete reliability of results is crucial for their usability for further processing, which makes it absolutely necessary for experts to controll these results and to modify them, if necessary. This fact led me to develop an editor for the MetaMap Transfer (MMTx) program [2, 3] that enables experts in medical science to solve this task without requiring special skills in information processing. MapFace was designed to realize an easy way to edit the MetaMap results as well as to provide access to all assigned information by a single "mouse-click" in combination with a clearly arranged visualization of the acquired information.