title: Towards semantic search and inference in electronic medical records: An approach using concept--based information retrieval.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  This paper presents a novel approach to searching electronic medical records that is based on concept matching rather than keyword matching.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  The concept-based approach is intended to overcome specific challenges we identified in searching medical records.
  
  
  METHODS
  Queries and documents were transformed from their term-based originals into medical concepts as defined by the SNOMED-CT ontology.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Evaluation on a real-world collection of medical records showed our concept-based approach outperformed a keyword baseline by 25% in Mean Average Precision.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The concept-based approach provides a framework for further development of inference based search systems for dealing with medical data.
authors.affiliation: Australian e-Health Research Centre, CSIRO, Brisbane, Australia  ;  Science & Engineering Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.
authors.forename: Bevan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Koopman
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bruza
authors.forename: Laurianne
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Sitbon
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lawley
keywords: Electronic medical records; Health informatics.; Information retrieval; Semantic search and inference