Bevan Koopman1, Peter Bruza, Laurianne Sitbon, Michael Lawley. 1. Australian e-Health Research Centre, CSIRO, Brisbane, Australia ; Science & Engineering Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: This paper presents a novel approach to searching electronic medical records that is based on concept matching rather than keyword matching. AIM: The concept-based approach is intended to overcome specific challenges we identified in searching medical records. METHOD: Queries and documents were transformed from their term-based originals into medical concepts as defined by the SNOMED-CT ontology. RESULTS: Evaluation on a real-world collection of medical records showed our concept-based approach outperformed a keyword baseline by 25% in Mean Average Precision. CONCLUSION: The concept-based approach provides a framework for further development of inference based search systems for dealing with medical data.
BACKGROUND: This paper presents a novel approach to searching electronic medical records that is based on concept matching rather than keyword matching. AIM: The concept-based approach is intended to overcome specific challenges we identified in searching medical records. METHOD: Queries and documents were transformed from their term-based originals into medical concepts as defined by the SNOMED-CT ontology. RESULTS: Evaluation on a real-world collection of medical records showed our concept-based approach outperformed a keyword baseline by 25% in Mean Average Precision. CONCLUSION: The concept-based approach provides a framework for further development of inference based search systems for dealing with medical data.
Keywords:
Electronic medical records; Health informatics.; Information retrieval; Semantic search and inference