Thorsten Kurz

Keywords: Thorsten Kurz Torsten Kurz CV Resume Lebenslauf Ingenieur Engineer Explorer Ontology Learning Interface Visualisation ICD10 CIM10 TARMED Universität Université University Neuchâtel UNINE EPFL EPF ETH

Welcome!

You see things,
and you say, "Why?"
I dream things that never were,
and I say, "Why not?"
-- George Bernard Shaw

This page contains the following sections:

• Research
• Contact
• Publications

My Photos are on Panoramio or Picasa

Research

Accurately locating concepts in ontologies has become an critical task today. Not only the Semantic Web, but also older classification systems, e.g. in the medical domain, rely on correctly chosen concepts for document retrieval as well as for statistical or billing purposes. At the Information Management Institute of the University of Neuchâtel I'm working with three methods through which concept retrieval from an medical ontology can be improved:

1. The recall of correct concepts can be increased by the application of appropriate morphological operations on query terms and the enhancement of concept labels with synonymous terms.
2. The efficiency of a manual selection process from a result set can be improved by structuring the result set correspondingly to the original ontology.
3. The vocabulary of a retrieval system can be adapted to its users by analysing their interactions with the system.

Based on the ICD10 I implemented a concept retrieval system to compare the performance of different combinations of these techniques. Within this context I conceptualised and implemented different techniques of stemming and word decomposition for the French medical language. The system found a wide and enthusiastic user base, so that the final evaluation can be carried out with over one million individual query processes from real users of the system.

Two prototype systems are currently available:

• Explorateur TARMED for classifying medical services with TARMED,
• Explorateur CIM10 for coding patient records with the ICD10.

Contact

Email: thorsten.kurz@unine.ch

Publications

T. Kurz, K. Stoffel, Web-Based Tools for Codification with Medical Ontologies in Switzerland, Proc. of ECAI 2006, pp. 642-646, Riva del Garda, August 2006.

T. Kurz, K. Stoffel, Web-Based Tools for Working with Health Care Ontologies in Switzerland, Proc. of ECDL 2003 Workshop on Digital Libraries in Healtcare, Trondheim, August 2003.

T. Kurz, K. Stoffel, Enriching Ontologies for Improved Access to Web Documents, Proc. of the IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2002, pp. 815-818, Lisbon, November 2002.

T. Kurz, K. Stoffel, An Advanced Stemming Algorithm for Creating Concept Signatures of Medical Terms, Knowledge Based Systems Journal, Volume 15, Numbers 5-6, pp. 309-313, June 2002.

T. Kurz, P. Thiran, J.-Y. Le Boudec, Regulation of a Connection Admission Control Algorithm, Proc. of INFOCOM '99, New York, pp. 1053-1061, March 1999.

T. Kurz, J.-Y. Le Boudec, H. J. Einsiedler, Realizing the Benefits of Virtual LANs by Using IPv6, Proc. of the IEEE 1998 International Zürich Seminar on Broadband Communications, Zürich, pp. 279-283, February 1998.

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