A Comparison of Different Retrieval Strategies Working on Medical Free Texts

Markus Kreuzthaler (Medical University of Graz, Austria)

Marcus D. Bloice (Medical University of Graz, Austria)

Lukas Faulstich (KGaA (ID), Germany)

Klaus-Martin Simonic (Medical University of Graz, Austria)

Andreas Holzinger (Medical University of Graz, Austria)

Abstract: Patient information in health care systems mostly consists of textual data, and free text in particular makes up a significant amount of it. Information retrieval systems that concentrate on these text types have to deal with the different challenges these medical free texts pose to achieve an acceptable performance. This paper describes the evaluation of four different types of information retrieval strategies: keyword search, search performed by a medical domain expert, a semantic based information retrieval tool, and a purely statistical information retrieval method. The different methods are evaluated and compared with respect to its appliance in medical health care systems.

Keywords: evaluation, health care, information retrieval, medicine, text mining

Categories: H.3.3, I.1.3, I.2.7, J.3