Retrieving Medical Literature for Clinical Decision Support

Keeping current given the vast volume of medical literature published yearly poses a serious challenge for medical professionals. Thus, interest in systems that aid physicians in making clinical decisions is intensifying. A task of Clinical Decision Support (CDS) systems is retrieving highly relevant medical literature that could help healthcare professionals in formulating diagnoses or determining treatments. This search task is atypical as the queries are medical case reports, which differs in terms of size and structure from queries in other, more common search tasks. We apply query reformulation techniques to address literature search based on case reports. The proposed system achieves a statistically significant improvement over the baseline (29% – 32%) and the state-of-the-art (12% – 59%).