Design and Evaluation of the iMed Intelligent Medical Search Engine

-- Searching for medical information on the Web is popular and important. However, medical search has its own unique requirements that are poorly handled by existing medical Web search engines. This paper presents iMed, the first intelligent medical Web search engine that extensively uses medical knowledge and questionnaire to facilitate ordinary Internet users to search for medical information. iMed introduces and extends expert system technology into the search engine domain. It uses several key techniques to improve its usability and search result quality. First, since ordinary users often cannot clearly describe their situations due to lack of medical background, iMed uses a questionnaire-based query interface to guide searchers to provide the most important information about their situations. Second, iMed uses medical knowledge to automatically form multiple queries from a searcher' answers to the questions. Using these queries to perform search can significantly improve the ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Gang Luo
• Keywords: Database, ICDE 2009, Intelligent Medical Web, Medical Search, Medical Web Search, Related Medical Phrases, Search Engine Domain