School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA.
BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2010 Oct 22;10:64. doi: 10.1186/1472-6947-10-64.
As the use of electronic health records (EHRs) becomes more widespread, so does the need to search and provide effective information discovery within them. Querying by keyword has emerged as one of the most effective paradigms for searching. Most work in this area is based on traditional Information Retrieval (IR) techniques, where each document is compared individually against the query. We compare the effectiveness of two fundamentally different techniques for keyword search of EHRs.
We built two ranking systems. The traditional BM25 system exploits the EHRs' content without regard to association among entities within. The Clinical ObjectRank (CO) system exploits the entities' associations in EHRs using an authority-flow algorithm to discover the most relevant entities. BM25 and CO were deployed on an EHR dataset of the cardiovascular division of Miami Children's Hospital. Using sequences of keywords as queries, sensitivity and specificity were measured by two physicians for a set of 11 queries related to congenital cardiac disease.
Our pilot evaluation showed that CO outperforms BM25 in terms of sensitivity (65% vs. 38%) by 71% on average, while maintaining the specificity (64% vs. 61%). The evaluation was done by two physicians.
Authority-flow techniques can greatly improve the detection of relevant information in EHRs and hence deserve further study.
随着电子健康记录 (EHR) 的使用越来越广泛，对其中进行有效信息搜索和提供的需求也越来越大。关键词查询已经成为搜索的最有效模式之一。该领域的大多数工作都是基于传统的信息检索 (IR) 技术，其中每个文档都单独与查询进行比较。我们比较了两种用于 EHR 关键词搜索的基本不同技术的有效性。
我们构建了两个排名系统。传统的 BM25 系统利用 EHR 的内容，而不考虑其中实体之间的关联。临床 ObjectRank (CO) 系统利用 EHR 中的实体关联，使用权威流算法发现最相关的实体。BM25 和 CO 部署在迈阿密儿童医院心血管科的 EHR 数据集上。使用关键字序列作为查询，两位医生针对与先天性心脏病相关的 11 个查询集测量了敏感性和特异性。
我们的初步评估表明，CO 在敏感性（65%对 38%）方面平均比 BM25 高出 71%，同时保持特异性（64%对 61%）。评估由两名医生进行。
权威流技术可以大大提高 EHR 中相关信息的检测能力，因此值得进一步研究。
