CliniQA : highly reliable clinical question answering system.

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) aims to apply the best available evidences gained from scientific method to clinical decision making. From the computer science point of view, the current bottleneck of applying EBM by a decision maker (either a patient or a physician) is the time-consuming manual retrieval, appraisal, and interpretation of scientific evidences from large volume of and rapidly increasing medical research reports. Patients do not have the expertise to do it. For physicians, study has shown that they usually have insufficient time to conduct the task. CliniQA tries to shift the burden of time and expertise from the decision maker to the computer system. Given a single clinical foreground question, the CliniQA will return a highly reliable answer based on existing medical research reports. Besides this, the CliniQA will also return the analyzed information from the research report to help users appraise the medical evidences more efficiently.