Intelligent output interface for intelligent medical search engine

Abstract

To facilitate ordinary people to search medical information, we have built an intelligent medical Web search engine called iMed. iMed uses medical knowledge and an interactive questionnaire to find multiple diseases serving as queries. The search results of these queries are combined together and returned to the searcher in a traditional sequential order. Nevertheless, searchers still frequently miss desired information, because the traditional search result output interface cannot capture the internal structures of medical search results. This paper presents a new, intelligent search result output interface devoted to intelligent medical search. The new output interface automatically offers searchers what they want instead of waiting until they ask explicitly. It structures all the search results into a multi-level hierarchy with explicitly marked medical meanings. In this way, searchers can efficiently navigate among all the search results and quickly obtain desired information. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques through an evaluation using USMLE medical exam cases. Copyright © 2008, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.