An Online Multilingual Medical Vocabulary/Thesaurus/Dictionary (MED-VTD) for Facilitating Understanding of Medical Texts

Medical texts (e.g., reports and medicine leaflets) are usually written by professionals (physicians, medical researchers, etc.) who use their own language and communication style. On the other hand, they are often read by health consumers or other medical professionals who do not have the same vocabularies and can have difficulties in text comprehension. Thus, to help a generic user in understanding a medical text, it would be desirable to have an online medical vocabulary/thesaurus/dictionary that he/she can easily look for finding the plain equivalent of any medical (technical) term and a definition of the term with the same kind of language. In this work, we present an online multilingual medical vocabulary/thesaurus/dictionary (MED-VTD) that helps the generic user in understanding any medical text written either in English or in Italian. To this end, we have built an integrated system that uses medical vocabularies for creating a list of medical (technical) terms, consumer health vocabularies (CHVs) for translating the technical terms into their consumer equivalents and consumer dictionaries for finding supplementary information on the terms. MED-VTD contains both English and Italian resources so that a translation of terms between the two languages can also be automatically performed. Moreover, other languages can easily be added providing that the related vocabularies, thesauri and dictionaries are available.