Rare disease diagnosis as an information retrieval task

TY - CONF

T1 - Rare disease diagnosis as an information retrieval task

AU - Dragusin, Radu

AU - Petcu, Paula

AU - Lioma, Christina

AU - Larsen, Birger

AU - Jørgensen, Henrik

AU - Winther, Ole

PY - 2011

Y1 - 2011

N2 - Increasingly more clinicians use web Information Retrieval (IR) systems to assist them in diagnosing difficult medical cases, for instance rare diseases that they may not be familiar with. However, web IR systems are not necessarily optimised for this task. For instance, clinicians’ queries tend to be long lists of symptoms, often containing phrases, whereas web IR systems typically expect very short keywordbased queries. Motivated by such differences, this work uses a preliminary study of 30 clinical cases to reflect on rare disease retrieval as an IR task. Initial experiments using both Google web search and offline retrieval from a rare disease collection indicate that the retrieval of rare diseases is an open problem with room for improvement.

AB - Increasingly more clinicians use web Information Retrieval (IR) systems to assist them in diagnosing difficult medical cases, for instance rare diseases that they may not be familiar with. However, web IR systems are not necessarily optimised for this task. For instance, clinicians’ queries tend to be long lists of symptoms, often containing phrases, whereas web IR systems typically expect very short keywordbased queries. Motivated by such differences, this work uses a preliminary study of 30 clinical cases to reflect on rare disease retrieval as an IR task. Initial experiments using both Google web search and offline retrieval from a rare disease collection indicate that the retrieval of rare diseases is an open problem with room for improvement.

KW - rare diseases

KW - clinical information retrieval

KW - web diagnosis

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-23318-0_38

DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-23318-0_38

M3 - Poster

ER -