Indexing medical literature on the Web using UMLS.

摘要

When searching medical literature, users often have difficulty in formulating specific queries and therefore, very general query terms are used. As a result the users are often overwhelmed by a large amount of documents retrieved without knowing the relationship among the documents or within medicine itself. This research developed a medical information search system that took two approaches to solving these problems: (1) grouping documents in a logical way, and (2) providing tools to help users to formulate specific queries. This study indexed Web-based biomedical literature by mapping strings in medical documents to the concepts of the Metathesaurus of the Unified Medical Language System. The indexing terms maintain the hierarchical relationship of the Metathesaurus and are displayed in an easy-to-use interface where users can view and query the index terms. In addition, when submitting a query, both the original query term and terms that are more specific than the original query term are returned and displayed in a hierarchical tree. Therefore the users can refine the query by iterating the searching process. Documents retrieved from this system contain the same concepts as those of the query strings or the index terms. It is suggested that the approaches taken by this study for indexing medical literature and displaying the indexing terms in a hierarchical fashion would be very helpful for users searching medical information.