Intelligent medical search engine

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An intelligent medical search engine is a vertical search engine that uses expert system technology to provide personalized medical information. [1]

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Description

Searching for medical information on the Web is a challenging task for ordinary Internet users. Often, users are uncertain about their exact medical situations, are unfamiliar with medical terminology, and hence have difficulty in coming up with the right search keywords. [2] An intelligent medical search engine is specifically designed to address this challenge. It uses several techniques to improve its usability and search result quality. First, it uses an interactive questionnaire-based query interface to guide users to provide the most important information about their situations. Users perform search by selecting symptoms and answering questions rather than by typing keyword queries. Second, it uses medical knowledge (e.g., diagnostic decision trees) to automatically form multiple queries from a user' answers to the questions. These queries are used to perform search simultaneously. Third, it provides various kinds of help functions. [3]

See also

Related Research Articles

Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.

Question answering (QA) is a computer science discipline within the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP), which is concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions posed by humans in a natural language.

Metasearch engine

A metasearch engine is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, ranked, and presented to the users.

Content-based image retrieval

Content-based image retrieval, also known as query by image content (QBIC) and content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR), is the application of computer vision techniques to the image retrieval problem, that is, the problem of searching for digital images in large databases. Content-based image retrieval is opposed to traditional concept-based approaches.

Automatic image annotation is the process by which a computer system automatically assigns metadata in the form of captioning or keywords to a digital image. This application of computer vision techniques is used in image retrieval systems to organize and locate images of interest from a database.

Exploratory search is a specialization of information exploration which represents the activities carried out by searchers who are:

Relevance feedback is a feature of some information retrieval systems. The idea behind relevance feedback is to take the results that are initially returned from a given query, to gather user feedback, and to use information about whether or not those results are relevant to perform a new query. We can usefully distinguish between three types of feedback: explicit feedback, implicit feedback, and blind or "pseudo" feedback.

Multi-document summarization is an automatic procedure aimed at extraction of information from multiple texts written about the same topic. The resulting summary report allows individual users, such as professional information consumers, to quickly familiarize themselves with information contained in a large cluster of documents. In such a way, multi-document summarization systems are complementing the news aggregators performing the next step down the road of coping with information overload.

Query expansion (QE) is the process of reformulating a given query to improve retrieval performance in information retrieval operations, particularly in the context of query understanding. In the context of search engines, query expansion involves evaluating a user's input and expanding the search query to match additional documents. Query expansion involves techniques such as:

A web query or web search query is a query that a user enters into a web search engine to satisfy their information needs. Web search queries are distinctive in that they are often plain text and boolean search directives are rarely used. They vary greatly from standard query languages, which are governed by strict syntax rules as command languages with keyword or positional parameters.

Human–computer information retrieval (HCIR) is the study and engineering of information retrieval techniques that bring human intelligence into the search process. It combines the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI) and information retrieval (IR) and creates systems that improve search by taking into account the human context, or through a multi-step search process that provides the opportunity for human feedback.

A concept search is an automated information retrieval method that is used to search electronically stored unstructured text for information that is conceptually similar to the information provided in a search query. In other words, the ideas expressed in the information retrieved in response to a concept search query are relevant to the ideas contained in the text of the query.

Natural-language user interface is a type of computer human interface where linguistic phenomena such as verbs, phrases and clauses act as UI controls for creating, selecting and modifying data in software applications.

Expertise finding is the use of tools for finding and assessing individual expertise. In the recruitment industry, expertise finding is the problem of searching for employable candidates with certain required skills set. In other words, it is the challenge of linking humans to expertise areas, and as such is a sub-problem of expertise retrieval.

XML retrieval, or XML information retrieval, is the content-based retrieval of documents structured with XML. As such it is used for computing relevance of XML documents.

Collaborative search engines (CSE) are Web search engines and enterprise searches within company intranets that let users combine their efforts in information retrieval (IR) activities, share information resources collaboratively using knowledge tags, and allow experts to guide less experienced people through their searches. Collaboration partners do so by providing query terms, collective tagging, adding comments or opinions, rating search results, and links clicked of former (successful) IR activities to users having the same or a related information need.

Learning to rank Use of machine learning to rank items

Learning to rank or machine-learned ranking (MLR) is the application of machine learning, typically supervised, semi-supervised or reinforcement learning, in the construction of ranking models for information retrieval systems. Training data consists of lists of items with some partial order specified between items in each list. This order is typically induced by giving a numerical or ordinal score or a binary judgment for each item. The goal of constructing the ranking model is to rank new, unseen lists in a similar way to rankings in the training data.

Page Hunt is a game developed by Bing for investigating human research behavior. It is a so-called "game with a purpose", as it pursues additional goals: not only to provide entertainment but also to harness human computation for some specific research task. The term "games with a purpose" was coined by Luis von Ahn, inventor of CAPTCHA, co-organizer of the reCAPTCHA project, and inventor of a famous ESP game.

Personalcasting, or personalized digital television (PDTV), is an application that uses news-on-demand algorithms to deliver tailored broadcast news on a wide range of computing platforms including mobile phones and PDAs. Unlike podcasting, which is a series of digital media files that are typically downloaded through web syndication, personalcasting automatically indexes, clusters and extracts information from news sources.

Query understanding is the process of inferring the intent of a search engine user by extracting semantic meaning from the searcher’s keywords. Query understanding methods generally take place before the search engine retrieves and ranks results. It is related to natural language processing but specifically focused on the understanding of search queries. Query understanding is at the heart of technologies like Amazon Alexa, Apple's Siri. Google Assistant, IBM's Watson, and Microsoft's Cortana.

References

Citations

  1. Luo and Tang, SIGIR 2008
  2. Luo and Tang, ICPR 2008
  3. Luo and Tang, SIGIR 2008; Luo, AAAI 2008

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