Background: Pregnant women should be provided with relevant and useful information to manage this specific period of their lives. Assessing information needs of this group is a prerequisite for providing this information.Objective: The aim of this study was to assess the information needs of pregnant women during their pregnancy and childbirth.Methods: This descriptive study was conducted on the pregnant women who attended antenatal clinics and obstetricians/gynaecologists’ offices in Kerman, Iran, in 2015. Data were collected using a self‐administered, valid and reliable questionnaire. A total of 400 women participated in the study.Findings: Most pregnant women needed information about care of the foetus (n = 344, 86%), physical and psychological complications after delivery (n = 333, 83%), development and growth of the foetus (n = 330, 82.5%), pregnancy nutrition (n = 327, 82%) and special tests during pregnancy (n = 326, 81.5%). They mostly (n = 195, 49%) looked for information when they were suffering from a disease or pregnancy complications.Conclusions: As pregnant women need extensive information to be able to take care of themselves and their babies, their information needs should be identified and taken into consideration when planning educational programmes for this group of women.
1 February 2011 in International Journal of Medical Informatics
Background: Extracting information from free texts using natural language processing (NLP) can save time and reduce the hassle of manually extracting large quantities of data from incredibly complex clinical notes of cancer patients. This study aimed to systematically review studies that used NLP methods to identify cancer concepts from clinical notes automatically. Methods: PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Embase were searched for English language papers using a combination of the terms concerning “Cancer”, “NLP”, “Coding”, and “Registries” until June 29, 2021. Two reviewers independently assessed the eligibility of papers for inclusion in the review. Results: Most of the software programs used for concept extraction reported were developed by the researchers (n = 7). Rule-based algorithms were the most frequently used algorithms for developing these programs. In most articles, the criteria of accuracy (n = 14) and sensitivity (n = 12) were used to evaluate the algorithms. In addition, Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) and Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) were the most commonly used terminologies to identify concepts. Most studies focused on breast cancer (n = 4, 19%) and lung cancer (n = 4, 19%). Conclusion: The use of NLP for extracting the concepts and symptoms of cancer has increased in recent years. The rule-based algorithms are well-liked algorithms by developers. Due to these algorithms' high accuracy and sensitivity in identifying and extracting cancer concepts, we suggested that future studies use these algorithms to extract the concepts of other diseases as well.
13 November 2015 in Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice