Interactive clinical query derivation and evaluation

For an effective search and management of large amounts of medical image and patient data, it is relevant to know the kind of information the clinicians search for. This information is typically represented in the search queries of the clinicians, which they send to retrieve the related text and images. Collecting these queries via typical expert interviews, however, is inappropriate. The reason is that for a successful communication during the interview some medical knowledge background of the knowledge engineer becomes necessary, which is usually not available. Therefore, alternative techniques are required to obtain relevant information about clinical search queries that are independent of the expert interviews. The query pattern derivation approach described here is one technique to gain this information. It is based on the prediction of clinical query patterns given domain ontologies and corpora. The patterns identified in this way are then presented to the clinical experts via an interactive browser for knowledge elicitation and evaluation purposes. Being an interactive tool, the Clinical Query Pattern Browser also supports the communication process between the clinical expert and the knowledge engineer.