Overview

What?

A multi-lingual, multi-modal search and access system for biomedical information and documents. The system will allow access to biomedical data:

  • from many sources,
  • analyzing and indexing multi-dimensional (2D, 3D, 4D) medical images,
  • with improved search capabilities due to the integration of technologies to link the texts and images to facts in a knowledge base,
  • in a multi-lingual environment,
  • providing trustable results at a level of understandability adapted to the users.

KHRESMOI will combine multiple data sources and knowledge derived from various heterogeneous knowledge sources. This includes text sources such as online journals and books, and trusted websites; and image sources, including images from journals and images from Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) at radiology departments.

For Whom?

  1. Members of the general public, including people who are ill, people with a relative/friend who is ill, and non-professional seekers of medical information.
  2. Medical doctors (MDs), in particular general practitioners and various health professionals.
  3. Radiologists in university or non-university hospitals.

Why?

  1. Members of the general public frequently seek medical information online. This process is currently inefficient, unreliable and potentially dangerous. It is thus important that they are provided with reliable and understandable medical information in their own language.
  2. Medical doctors need rapid and accurate answers – a search of MEDLINE takes on average 30 minutes, while doctors have on average 5 minutes available for such a search. Furthermore, over 40% of searches do not yield the information required.
  3. Radiologists are drowning in images – at larger hospitals around 100GB of new images are created per day.

How?

  • Foundational Research: effective extraction of information from text; automated 2D, 3D, 4D medical image analysis; linking structured information and unstructured text; support of multi-lingual search and adaptive user interfaces.
  • Component Level research: results of foundational research will flow directly into new and existing components. Existing open source components for which consortium members are maintainers or contributors include: GATE, DAFFODIL, KIM, OWLIM, GIFT, MOSES.
  • Integration: the components will be integrated into a robust, efficient and scalable test-bed for biomedical information search. At three milestones, integrated system prototypes are planned to be complete during the project, with an initial architecture to be ready by the end of the first year. Continuing foundational research incorporated into improved components will enhance the system.

Expected Impacts:

  • Medical Impact: Improve the access to medical information for doctors, so that they have more time to talk to and to treat patients, having all the information required for doing so more effectively. Convert the flood of radiological image data into a boon instead of a curse.
  • Scientific Impact: Address the lack of publicly available large-scale data sets and realistic task-based scenarios on which to assess new technologies. Make available cutting edge techniques implemented in open source software.
  • Industrial Impact: Improve existing open source products’ stability, features and performance, and hence their attractiveness and suitability for wider deployment.
  • Public Impact: Members of the public will be using the Health on the Net search engine, improved by the KHRESMOI technology, relatively early in the project.

Khresmoi – the facts

Start: 1 September 2010
End: 31 August 2014
Duration: 48 months
Budget (total): approx. €10 Million
EC contribution: approx. €8 Million
Partners: 12 (from 9 countries)
Project Number: FP7 – 257528

 

Khresmoi Greek Letters

Khresmoi in greek letters meaning: oracles