title: An infobutton for Web 2.0 clinical discussions: the knowledge linkage framework.
abstract: This paper aims to develop an infobutton to automatically retrieve published papers corresponding to a topic-specific online clinical discussion. The knowledge linkages infobutton is designed to supplement online clinical conversations with pertinent medical literature from Pubmed. The project involves three distinct steps: 1) Clinical messages around a specific problem are grouped together into a thread. 2) These threads are processed using Metamap to link the conversations to keywords from the MeSH lexicon. 3) These keywords are used in a novel search strategy to retrieve a set of papers from Pubmed, which are then returned to the user. A pilot study using the messages from 2007 and 2008, was conducted to compare the knowledge linkage search strategy to a vector space model and extended Boolean model. The knowledge linkage model proved to be significantly better in terms of precision ( p = 0.013 and 0.003, respectively) and recall ( p = 0.351 and 0.013). Pertinent papers were returned to over 55% of the threads. This approach has demonstrated how clinicians can supplement their peer communications with evidence based research. Future work should focus on how to improve the threading and keyword-mapping strategies.
authors: NICHE Research Group, Faculty of Computer Science, Halifax, NS, Canada. sam.stewart@dal.ca
authors: Samuel Alan
authors: SA
authors: Stewart
authors: Syed Sibte Raza
authors: SS
authors: Abidi
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D035843:Biomedical Research; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D046650:Medical Subject Headings; D039781:PubMed; D061108:Social Media; D012984:Software