Can an Ad-hoc ontology Beat a Medical Search Engine? The Chronious Search Engine case
This work addresses the need for more effective medical information retrieval for clinicians managing chronic diseases like COPD and CKD, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing ontology methods.
The paper tackled the problem of improving literature search for chronic disease management by developing an ontology-based search engine within the Chronious platform, and found that it outperformed a leading web search engine on certain parameters.
Chronious is an Open, Ubiquitous and Adaptive Chronic Disease Management Platform for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease(COPD) Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) and Renal Insufficiency. It consists of several modules: an ontology based literature search engine, a rule based decision support system, remote sensors interacting with lifestyle interfaces (PDA, monitor touch-screen) and a machine learning module. All these modules interact each other to allow the monitoring of two types of chronic diseases and to help clinician in taking decision for care purpose. This paper illustrates how the ontology search engine was created and fed and how some comparative test indicated that the ontology based approach give better results, on some estimation parameters, than the main reference web search engine.