Clinical task-specific query expansion for the retrieval of scientifically rigorous research documents

To support the practice of evidence-based medicine (EBM), clinically relevant and scientifically sound articles should be easily accessible. Due to the huge volume of medical literature and the low performance of present retrieval models, clinicians could only get relevant documents in the order of publication time. This study propose a new clinical task-specific retrieval technique that improves retrieval accuracy by exploiting clinical task-specific EBM terms to query expansion using co-occurrence analysis technique. The idea is aimed at selecting query expansion terms that are relevant to a specific clinical-task using task-specific EBM terms. Focusing on treatment and diagnosis tasks, the new method which was performed on the OHSUMED collection showed a further improved result than the existing method.