Addressing the Search Challenges of Precision Medicine with Information Retrieval Systems and Physician Readers

The Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), co-sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US and US Department of Defense, was started in 1992. TREC's purpose is to support research within the information retrieval community by providing the infrastructure necessary for large-scale evaluation of text retrieval methodologies. In 2017, the TREC Precision Medicine (Roberts et al., 2017) track grew from the Clinical Decision Support track and focused on a narrower problem domain of precision oncology. After three years of computer runs being evaluated for relevance by physician readers, we provide a unique perspective of how to evaluate computer-generated articles and clinical trials pulled from PubMed and Clinicaltrials.gov to find relevant information on medical cases.