U.Va. Researchers Create Google-Like Search Engine For Medical Literature
Charlottesville, VA - Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have created an online search engine - www.relemed.com - that provides medical professionals, researchers and the general public with a more efficient and targeted way to search PubMed for the latest, most relevant medical literature to answer medical queries.
ReleMed - short for Relevant Medicine - is not a general health site. It doesn't provide answers or suggest guidelines for specific medical problems. Rather, based on your search terms, ReleMed retrieves the most relevant recent references published about a problem or a combination of conditions, versus any article in which the search terms appear.
"Most of the search engines that examine the 16 million articles currently indexed by The National Library of Medicine give you the most recently published articles, but they don't look for relevance of the articles to your query," said Dr. Mir Siadaty, ReleMed's developer. "For example, say you want to find the most relevant articles for the relationship between Hepatitis C and Arthritis. If you search using PubMed you will receive hundreds of articles that randomly contain the terms "Hepatitis C" and "Arthritis" but without, necessarily, indicating the relationship between them. Even if the PubMed search happens to return articles in which the relationship between Hepatitis C and Arthritis is discussed, those articles can be hard to find. You may have to read through dozens, sometimes hundreds, of abstracts to locate them.
"We designed ReleMed so that the first articles returned in response to a query have close relationships between the search terms. This means you can quickly find not only the most recent articles, like PubMed does, but also - and more importantly - the most relevant articles." ReleMed works by assigning each of the articles a relevance or priority score. An article assigned a ranking of "1" - the highest possible - has clear relationships among the submitted search terms in all the critical parts of the article: the title, the abstract and in the key indexing or MeSH terms.
"ReleMed still lets the user decide which articles they want to examine in more detail," said Dr. William Knaus, professor and chairman of U.Va.'s Department of Public Health Sciences and Siadaty's collaborator, "but it makes that process so much quicker and more efficient by ranking and then color-coding the results. "With the explosion in the number of biomedical articles being published (more than 1,700 new articles daily), ReleMed allows you to cull through them efficiently. This great new tool retrieves and then organizes articles on medicine and biology so that the user spends less time reading through articles that are not directly responsive to their needs."
SOURCE: American Medical Informatics Association