title: The MiPACQ clinical question answering system.
abstract: The Multi-source Integrated Platform for Answering Clinical Questions (MiPACQ) is a QA pipeline that integrates a variety of information retrieval and natural language processing systems into an extensible question answering system. We present the system's architecture and an evaluation of MiPACQ on a human-annotated evaluation dataset based on the Medpedia health and medical encyclopedia. Compared with our baseline information retrieval system, the MiPACQ rule-based system demonstrates 84% improvement in Precision at One and the MiPACQ machine-learning-based system demonstrates 134% improvement. Other performance metrics including mean reciprocal rank and area under the precision/recall curves also showed significant improvement, validating the effectiveness of the MiPACQ design and implementation.
authors.affiliation: University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA.
authors.forename: Brian L
authors.initials: BL
authors.lastname: Cairns
authors.forename: Rodney D
authors.initials: RD
authors.lastname: Nielsen
authors.forename: James J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Masanz
authors.forename: James H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Martin
authors.forename: Martha S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Palmer
authors.forename: Wayne H
authors.initials: WH
authors.lastname: Ward
authors.forename: Guergana K
authors.initials: GK
authors.lastname: Savova
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003199:Computer Systems; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D006801:Humans; D007256:Information Systems; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D057386:Search Engine; D012984:Software