Context-Sensitive Medical Information Retrieval

Abstract

Substantial medical data such as pathology reports, operative reports, discharge summaries, and radiology reports are stored in textual form. Databases containing free-text medical narratives often need to be searched to find relevant information for clinical and research purposes. Terms that appear in these documents tend to appear in different contexts. The context of negation, a negative finding, is of special importance, since many of the most frequently described findings are those denied by the patient or subsequently “ruled out.” Hence, when searching free-text narratives for patients with a certain medical condition, if negation is not taken into account, many of the retrieved documents will be irrelevant.