Overview of the TREC 2014 Clinical Decision Support Track

Abstract

Abstract : In making clinical decisions, physicians often seek out information about how to best care for their patients. Information relevant to a physician can be related to a variety of clinical tasks such as determining a patient s most likely diagnosis given a list of symptoms, deciding on the most effective treatment plan for a patient having a known condition, and determining if a particular test is indicated for a given situation. In some cases, physicians can find the information they seek in published biomedical literature. However, given the volume of the existing literature and the rapid pace at which new research is published, locating the most relevant and timely information for a particular clinical need can be a daunting and time-consuming task. To make biomedical information more accessible and to meet the requirements for the meaningful use of electronic health records, a goal of modern clinical decision support systems is to anticipate the needs of physicians by linking electronic health records with information relevant for patient care. The Clinical Decision Support Track aims to simulate the requirements of such systems and to encourage the creation of tools and resources necessary for their implementation. The focus of the 2014 track was the retrieval of biomedical articles relevant for answering generic clinical questions about medical records. In the absence of a reusable, de-identified collection of medical records, we used short case reports, such as those published in biomedical articles, as idealized representations of actual medical records. A case report typically describes a challenging medical case, and it is often organized as a well-formed narrative summarizing the portions of a patient s medical record that are pertinent to the case. Participants of the track were challenged with retrieving, for a given case report, full-text biomedical articles relevant for answering questions related to several types of clinical information needs.

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