Assisting consumer health information retrieval with query recommendations.
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.
Zeng
Qing T
QT
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
Crowell
Jonathan
J
Plovnick
Robert M
RM
Kim
Eunjung
E
Ngo
Long
L
Dibble
Emily
E
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