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| What is MedISys? |
| MedISys (Medical Information System) is a real-time news alert system for medical and health-related topics. MedISys: |
- processes over 20000 articles per day from over 4000 sites of approximately 1600 news sources (news and medical sites) in 45 languages,
- dynamically updates statistics on all news topics every 10 minutes,
- categorises articles in pre-defined medical topics in 25 different languages,
- sends emails automatically to news subscribers at three different severity levels (low, medium and high),
- emails daily reports on a variety of different categories every morning at 7:30 CET to subscribers, and
- operates 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.
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| How does it work? |
| MedISys turns news into a signal. Over time stories come into the news then gradually disappear. Some topics appear regularly whereas other topics occur infrequently. MedISys keeps track of these topics comparing current news events with those in the past in order to quickly identify breaking news. |
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| What does MedISys offer over other news providers? |
| The system uses dynamic statistical modelling techniques to: |
- surpress news noise, i.e. stories that are regularly in the news,
- enchance stories with a poor signal, and
- indentify individual events on a temporal and locational basis.
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| Who are we? |
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MedISys is run by the Health Threats Unit at Directorate General Health and Consumer Affairs of the European Commission,
in collaboration with
the Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy. Its purpose is to reinforce the network for surveillance of communicable diseases and the early detection of bioterrorism activities.
It uses online information sources to rapidly detect, track and assess threats so that advance warning can be given.
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