title: Assisting consumer health information retrieval with query recommendations.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Health information retrieval (HIR) on the Internet has become an important practice for millions of people, many of whom have problems forming effective queries. We have developed and evaluated a tool to assist people in health-related query formation.
  
  
  METHODS
  We developed the Health Information Query Assistant (HIQuA) system. The system suggests alternative/additional query terms related to the user's initial query that can be used as building blocks to construct a better, more specific query. The recommended terms are selected according to their semantic distance from the original query, which is calculated on the basis of concept co-occurrences in medical literature and log data as well as semantic relations in medical vocabularies.
  
  
  METHODS
  An evaluation of the HIQuA system was conducted and a total of 213 subjects participated in the study. The subjects were randomized into 2 groups. One group was given query recommendations and the other was not. Each subject performed HIR for both a predefined and a self-defined task.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The study showed that providing HIQuA recommendations resulted in statistically significantly higher rates of successful queries (odds ratio = 1.66, 95% confidence interval = 1.16-2.38), although no statistically significant impact on user satisfaction or the users' ability to accomplish the predefined retrieval task was found.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Providing semantic-distance-based query recommendations can help consumers with query formation during HIR.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, Decision Systems Group, Thorn 309, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 75 Francis St, Boston, MA 02115, USA. qzeng@dsg.bwh.harvard.edu
authors.forename: Qing T
authors.initials: QT
authors.lastname: Zeng
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Crowell
authors.forename: Robert M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Plovnick
authors.forename: Eunjung
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Long
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ngo
authors.forename: Emily
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Dibble
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003258:Consumer Behavior; D006262:Health; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D020407:Internet; D010361:Patients; D012660:Semantics; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled