Towards semantic search and inference in electronic medical records: An approach using concept--based information retrieval.

BACKGROUND This paper presents a novel approach to searching electronic medical records that is based on concept matching rather than keyword matching. AIM The concept-based approach is intended to overcome specific challenges we identified in searching medical records. METHOD Queries and documents were transformed from their term-based originals into medical concepts as defined by the SNOMED-CT ontology. RESULTS Evaluation on a real-world collection of medical records showed our concept-based approach outperformed a keyword baseline by 25% in Mean Average Precision. CONCLUSION The concept-based approach provides a framework for further development of inference based search systems for dealing with medical data.