title: Evaluating the web as a clinical knowledge base.
abstract: Medical diagnostic decision support systems are some of the most visible applications of medical informatics. Many of these systems, however, were created in the pre-WWW era, when access to clinical knowledge was much more limited than it is currently. Using the Google(tm) Java API1, we created a simple program to extract potential diagnoses from a general web search. Our system performed at a level comparable to other medical expert systems.
authors.affiliation: Partners HealthCare, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Davis T
authors.initials: DT
authors.lastname: Bu
authors.forename: Michael N
authors.initials: MN
authors.lastname: Cantor
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D020000:Decision Support Systems, Clinical; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted; D005103:Expert Systems; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D051188:Knowledge Bases; D012984:Software