Improving Medical Information Retrieval with PICO Element Detection

Without a well formulated and structured question, it can be very difficult and time consuming for physicians to identify appropriate resources and search for the best available evidence for medical treatment in evidence-based medicine (EBM). In EBM, clinical studies and questions involve four aspects: Population/Problem (P), Intervention (I), Comparison (C) and Outcome (O), which are known as PICO elements. It is intuitively more advantageous to use these elements in Information Retrieval (IR). In this paper, we first propose an approach to automatically identify the PICO elements in documents and queries. We test several possible approaches to use the identified elements in IR. Experiments show that it is a challenging task to determine accurately PICO elements. However, even with noisy tagging results, we can still take advantage of some PICO elements, namely I and P elements, to enhance the retrieval process, and this allows us to obtain significantly better retrieval effectiveness than the state-of-the-art methods.