Medical Information Retrieval
Bio:
Allan Hanbury is Senior Researcher at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria. He is scientific coordinator of the EU-funded KHRESMOI Integrated Project, which is developing innovative methods to search multilingual medical information and medical images. His research interests include information retrieval, multimodal information retrieval, and the evaluation of information retrieval algorithms. He obtained his PhD in 2002 from MINES ParisTech, Paris, France.
Summary:
Search techniques are becoming increasingly important in the medical domain, in particular due to an explosion in the amount of medical information available. This includes both patient- scientific information (e.g. electronic health records) and knowledge-based information (e.g.
scientific papers). The increasing emphasis on the use of evidence-based medicine (using the best evidence from the scientific literature in clinical decision making) also increases the importance of search in medical practice. Furthermore, the secondary use of anonymized electronic health records for facilitating research and improving quality in medical practice is also gaining in importance.
The tutorial will begin with an overview of the medical domain and examples of search applications in the medical domain. It will then go into detail on specific aspects of the domain: information sources; end users and their tasks; and search refinements. Finally, open challenges for IR in the medical domain will be presented.
The tutorial is aimed at PhD students, as well as junior and senior researchers. It aims to provide these researchers with sufficient domain-background, allowing them to identify promising ways of applying their techniques in the medical and health domain, and hence to contribute to a domain of rapidly growing importance.