Linking Specialized Online Medical Discussions to Online Medical Literature

The medical web comprises both medical communities engaged in discussions about specialized topics and a vast array of medical articles available through web-based databases. In this paper we present a knowledge linkage strategy that links online specialized medical discussions with corresponding online medical articles. The idea is to link the experiential knowledge generated in online medical discussions by a virtual community of specialized medical practitioners with the explicit knowledge available in online medical literature archives. We have developed a specialized medical literature search algorithm, based on the principles of the Extended Boolean Information Retrieval algorithm [6], to retrieve a ranked list of medical articles associated with the specialized medical discussion. The medical literature search algorithm is part of our knowledge linkage strategy that involves the generation of topic-specific discussion threads from online discussions, formulation of highly specialized search queries based on a specialized discussion thread and retrieval of published medical articles from PubMed that are closely related to the online discussion. We have applied our knowledge linkage strategy to the specialized medical topic of Pediatric Pain Management, and have achieved an improvement in the positive return rate (recall) from 55% to 70% in terms of linking online medical discussions to the correct medical articles.