DUTH at TREC 2015 Clinical Decision Support Track

Abstract

In this report we give an overview of our participation in the TREC 2015 Clinical Decision Support Track. We present two approaches for pre-processing and indexing of the open-access PubMed articles, and four methods for query construction which are applied to the previous two approaches. Regarding pre-processing, our main assumption is that only particular medical study designs are appropriate for each type of clinical question and we filter the number of articles in each clinical question type. Regarding query construction, our main idea is to detect the medical concepts in the medical cases and to expand them with terms of semantic controlled vocabularies (such as UMLS). The track evaluation shows that our approaches provide comparable results with the other participants’ approaches without to conclude on safe findings.