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Knowledge Systems Laboratory
Stanford University
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Abstract: Ontology-enhanced Search for Primary Care Medical Literature
Primary care physicians are challenged with a vast array of rapidly
changing medical literature in a broad spectrum of content areas.
It is difficult to stay current with the literature, yet patients' treatment
depends on a physician's ability to use tests and treatments that are effective medically,
of minimum invasiveness, and fit within insurance restrictions (or other financial considerations).
This combination strengthens the need for effective coping mechanisms such as online
search that supports physicians in finding literature relevant to a patent's situation
and meeting basic quality standards. While standard information retrieval methods provide
an excellent foundation, and content-specialized search access (such as Paperchase's early
interface to Medline) may be effective in some cases, many physicians seek smarter and
more versatile online search capabilities. We combined techniques in knowledge representation
with standard information retrieval tools to produce an ontology-enhanced online search
capability for unstructured and semi-structured medical documents.
We also addressed the resulting issues of scale and maintenance by building an environment
for use by distributed teams of domain-literate, but computer science-naïve users.
We will present our ontology-enriched online search environment along with our web tool
for collaborative development and maintenance of ontologies.
Deborah L. McGuinness .
``Ontology-enhanced Search for Primary Care Medical Literature,''. In
the Proceedings of the
International Medical Informatics Association Working Group 6- Medical
Concept Representation and Natural Language Processing Conference, Phoenix, Arizona, December
16--19, 1999.
abstract
Return to
Selected Papers of Deborah L. McGuinness.
