Demand for Intelligent Search Tools in Medicine and Health Care

Abstract

The high demand for medical knowledge poses a big challenge for information technology to offer user-friendly systems which help healthy citizens, patients and health professionals to find proper data, information and knowledge.

Medicine has a long history in structured or semi-structured documentation. On the one hand medical documentation of diagnoses has been performed using the ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision [294]) or other coding systems; on the other hand indexing of scientific literature has been done using key words from MeSH (Medical Subject Headings [213]). Coding systems like ICD, classifications and medical thesauri have been available for years. Scientifically validated terminologies like SNOMED (Standardized Nomenclature in Medicine [291]) and standardised messaging standards like HL7 (Health Level 7 [155]) and DICOM (Digital Imaging an Communication in Medicine [99]) have been facilitating communications between computer systems and different modalities and have achieved a broad market acceptance within the healthcare industry. Medical queries are among the most popular topics people are searching for in different databases an knowledge sources.