Exploring the use of concept spaces to improve medical information retrieval

This research investigated the application of techniques successfully used in previous information retrieval research, to the more challenging area of medical informatics. It was performed on a biomedical document collection testbed, Z .CANCERLIT, provided by the National Cancer Institute NCI , which contains information on all types of cancer therapy. The quality or usefulness of terms suggested by three different thesauri, one based on MeSH terms, one based solely on Z .terms from the document collection, and one based on the Unified Medical Language System UMLS Metathesaurus, was explored with the ultimate goal of improving CANCERLIT information search and retrieval. Researchers affiliated with the University of Arizona Cancer Center evaluated lists of related terms suggested by different thesauri for 12 different directed searches in the CANCERLIT testbed. The preliminary results indicated that among the thesauri, there were no statistically significant differences in either term ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2000
• Where: DSS
• Authors: Andrea L. Houston, Hsinchun Chen, Bruce R. Schatz, Susan Molloy Hubbard, Robin R. Sewell, Tobun D. Ng
• Keywords: Biomedical Document Collection, Document Collection, DSS 2000, Unified Medical Language System