Towards Effective Representation of Clinical Documents for Search and Retrieval

Recent studies have demonstrated the advantages of structured search of PubMed abstracts when compared with unstructured key word search. We explore whether search on clinical text is similarly enhanced by representing domain specific structures, information, and knowledge. Examples include representations of document structure and sections, local context such as negation, and appropriate modeling of scalar quantities. We examine tasks ranging from recruitment of suitable patients for studies, to chronic disease prevention and management, to longitudinal studies of individual patients or groups, as well as comparative experiments performed on an NLP enhanced clinical search tool that operates on large corpora of clinical text.