Topic Map for Medical E-Learning

Abstract

The paper presents original ways of using a modern concept - topic map - in medical e-learning. The topic map is mainly used for visualizing a thesaurus containing medical terms. The topic map is built and populated in an original manner, mapping an xml file that can be downloaded free, to an xtm file that contains the structure of the topic map. Only a part of the MeSH thesaurus was used, namely the part that includes the medical diagnosis’s names. The student can navigate through topic map depending on its interest subject, having in this way big advantages. The paper presents also how to use the topic map for semantic querying of a multimedia database with medical information and images. For retrieving the interest information this access path can be combined with another modern solution: the content-based visual query on the multimedia medical database. Combining these possibilities to access a database with medical data and images, allows students to see images and associated information in a simple and direct manner. The students are stimulated to learn, by comparing similar cases or by comparing cases that are visually similar, but with different diagnoses.