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. 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. For instance, if a user has made incorrect selections, does not know which symptoms to select, or cannot answer a question, he or she can invoke the search engine's help functionality and describe his or her health situation there. Then he or she will see multiple lists of help information, e.g., one list for relevance of unselected symptoms, and another list for relevance of alternate responses (to his or her selections). The contents of those lists are ranked using medical knowledge and specially designed medical information retrieval techniques.
Read more about this topic: Intelligent Medical Search Engine
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“As they are not seen on their way down the streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature in the scenery of the river bottoms worthy to be remembered with Shakespeare’s description of the sea-floor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“God damnit, why must all those journalists be such sticklers for detail? Why, they’d hold you to an accurate description of the first time you ever made love, expecting you to remember the color of the room and the shape of the windows.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)