Indexing and Retrieval of Medical Resources for a Telemedical Platform

摘要

In this paper we present an indexing and retrieval service for a telemedical platform. While the service has been deployed in the Wielkopolska Center of Telemedicine (WCT) - a platform to facilitate teleconsultations and education in the field of traumatology, it is general enough to be used in other settings. The service is composed of loosely coupled modules and implemented with open source frameworks and systems (e.g., Heritrix, MetaMap and Lucence). It automatically extracts medical resources from selected web-based repositories, indexes them using MeSH terms and finally retrieves resources relevant in the current context (e.g., the currently consulted case) without a need to formulate a query by the user. We also report results of a computational experiment conducted to help make specific implementation decisions for selected modules of the described service.