JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 17(7): 1109-1133, doi: 10.3217/jucs-017-07-1109
A Comparison of Different Retrieval Strategies Working on Medical Free Texts
expand article infoMarkus Kreuzthaler‡, Marcus D. Bloice‡, Lukas Faulstich§, Klaus-Martin Simonic‡, Andreas Holzinger‡
‡ Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria§ KGaA (ID), Berlin, Germany

Corresponding author: Markus Kreuzthaler ( markus.kreuzthaler@medunigraz.at )

© Markus Kreuzthaler, Marcus Bloice, Lukas Faulstich, Klaus-Martin Simonic, Andreas Holzinger.
This article is freely available under the J.UCS Open Content License.
Citation: Kreuzthaler M, Bloice MD, Faulstich L, Simonic K-M, Holzinger A (2011) A Comparison of Different Retrieval Strategies Working on Medical Free Texts. JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 17(7): 1109-1133. https://doi.org/10.3217/jucs-017-07-1109
Open Access
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
information retrieval, health care, medicine, evaluation, text mining