Textual Methods for Medical Case Retrieval

Medical case retrieval (MCR) is information retrieval in a collection of medical case descriptions, where descriptions of patients’ symptoms are used as queries. We apply known text retrieval techniques based on query and document expansion to this problem, and combine them with new algorithms to match queries and documents with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). We ran comprehensive experiments to evaluate 546 method combinations on the ImageCLEF 2013 MCR dataset. Methods combining MeSH query expansion with pseudo-relevance feedback performed best, delivering retrieval performance comparable to or slightly better than the best MCR run submitted to ImageCLEF 2013.