The oncological nurse assistant: a web-based intelligent oncological nurse advisor.

When a person gets a cancer diagnosis the need for medical guidance often appears. In Norway, one of the providers of medical guidelines is the Norwegian Cancer Association where oncological nurses assist people with a cancer diagnosis or their relatives. The nurses search through both national and internal guidebooks and web pages. The input to this process is mostly discharge letters. The whole process is time consuming. To serve more patients, PaSent, a web-based intelligent oncological nurse advisor, has been developed. Through using discharge letters as input to our neural network-based information retrieval system PaSent, we have been able to provide relevant medical information to the patient as well as to the health personnel themselves. The PaSent search method uses predefined knowledge about the context, paired with the vocabulary of the input document, to compute a relevance measure for a potential result document. The system has been validated by oncological nurses and medical doctors. In the reported experiments, the PaSent system is able to recommend literature, in the top section of the search result list, that our judges also found highly relevant.