No abstract

The Model for Assistance in the Orientation of a User within Coding Systems (MAOUSSC) project has been designed to provide a representation for medical and surgical procedures that allows several applications to be developed from several viewpoints. It is based on a conceptual model, a controlled set of terms, and Web server development. The design includes the UMLS knowledge sources associated with additional knowledge about medico-surgical procedures. The model was implemented using a relational database. The authors developed a complete interface for the Web presentation, with the intermediary layer being written in PERL. The server has been used for the representation of medico-surgical procedures that occur in the discharge summaries of the national survey of hospital activities that is performed by the French Health Statistics Agency in order to produce inpatient profiles. The authors describe the current status of the MAOUSSC server and discuss their interest in using such a server to assist in the coordination of terminology tasks and in the sharing of controlled terminologies.

Hospital emergency units are submitted to a continuous intensive and polyvalent practice of medicine. In addition to the few experienced physicians, the medical staff is often made up of young and unskilled students and residents. The ability to reach at any time a wide and flexible knowledge is of the utmost importance to improve the quality of care given to patients and to perfect bedside teaching. The purpose of this work was to present a computerized system, a kind of shell, using, in combination, artificial intelligence and hypertext/hypermedia tools. A modular architecture is presented integrating two entities: an illustrated encyclopedic hypertext network and several expert modules based on production rules concerning well-limited fields of medicine (basic clinical problem-solving, metabolic and acid-base disorders). An interface using the World Wide Web (WWW) will soon be proposed.