Using Natural Language Generation Technology to Improve Information Flows in Intensive Care Units

In the drive to improve patient safety, patients in modern intensive care units are closely monitored with the generation of very large volumes of data. Unless the data are further processed, it is difficult for medical and nursing staff to assimilate what is important. It has been demonstrated that data summarization in natural language has the potential to improve clinical decision making; we have implemented and evaluated a prototype system which generates such textual summaries automatically. Our evaluation of the computer generated summaries showed that the decisions made by medical and nursing staff after reading the summaries were as good as those made after viewing the currently available graphical presentations with the same information content. Since our automatically generated textual summaries can be improved by including additional content and expert knowledge, they promise to enhance information exchange between the medical and nursing staff, particularly when integrated ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ECAI
• Authors: Jim Hunter, Albert Gatt, François Portet, Ehud Reiter, Somayajulu Sripada
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Available Graphical Presentations, ECAI 2008, Nursing Staff, Textual Summaries