Christian Park

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of translation of RadLex lexicon from English to German performed by Google Translate, using the RadLex ontology as ground truth. The same comparison was also performed for German to English translations. We determined the concordance rate of the Google Translate–rendered translations (for both English to German and German to English translations) to the official German RadLex (translations provided by the German Radiological Society) and English RadLex terms via character-by-character concordance analysis (string matching). Specific term characteristics of term character count and word count were compared between concordant and discordant translations using t-tests. Google Translate–rendered translations originally considered incongruent (2482 English terms and 2500 German terms) were then reviewed by German and English-speaking radiologists to further evaluate clinical utility. Overall success rates of both methods were calculated by adding the percentage of terms marked correct by string comparison to the percentage marked correct during manual review extrapolated to the terms that had been initially marked incorrect during string analysis. 64,632 English and 47,425 German RadLex terms were analyzed. 3507 (5.4%) of the Google Translate–rendered English to German translations were concordant with the official German RadLex terms when evaluated via character-by-character concordance. 3288 (6.9%) of the Google Translate–rendered German to English translations matched the corresponding English RadLex terms. Human review of a random sample of non-concordant machine translations revealed that 95.5% of such English to German translations were understandable, whereas 43.9% of such German to English translations were understandable. Combining both string matching and human review resulted in an overall Google Translate success rate of 95.7% for English to German translations and 47.8% for German to English translations. For certain radiologic text translation tasks, Google Translate may be a useful tool for translating multi-language radiology reports into a common language for natural language processing and subsequent labeling of datasets for machine learning. Indeed, string matching analysis alone is an incomplete method for evaluating machine translation. However, when human review of automated translation is also incorporated, measured performance improves. Additional evaluation using longer text samples and full imaging reports is needed. An apparent discordance between English to German versus German to English translation suggests that the direction of translation affects accuracy.

The inhibition of bone healing in humans is a well-established effect associated with cigarette smoking, but the underlying mechanisms are still unclear. Recent work using animal cell lines have implicated the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) as a mediator of the anti-osteogenic effects of cigarette smoke, but the complexity of cigarette smoke mixtures makes understanding the mechanisms of action a major challenge. 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD, dioxin) is a high-affinity AhR ligand that is frequently used to investigate biological processes impacted by AhR activation. Since there are dozens of AhR ligands present in cigarette smoke, we utilized dioxin as a prototype ligand to activate the receptor and explore its effects on pro-osteogenic biomarkers and other factors critical to osteogenesis using a human osteoblast-like cell line. We also explored the capacity for AhR antagonists to protect against dioxin action in this context. We found dioxin to inhibit osteogenic differentiation, whereas co-treatment with various AhR antagonists protected against dioxin action. Dioxin also negatively impacted cell adhesion with a corresponding reduction in the expression of integrin and cadherin proteins, which are known to be involved in this process. Similarly, the dioxin-mediated inhibition of cell migration correlated with reduced expression of the chemokine receptor CXCR4 and its ligand, CXCL12, and co-treatment with antagonists restored migratory capacity. Our results suggest that AhR activation may play a role in the bone regenerative response in humans exposed to AhR activators, such as those present in cigarette smoke. Given the similarity of our results using a human cell line to previous work done in murine cells, animal models may yield data relevant to the human setting. In addition, the AhR may represent a potential therapeutic target for orthopedic patients who smoke cigarettes, or those who are exposed to secondhand smoke or other environmental sources of aryl hydrocarbons.