From Jeopardy to the Hospital: Interesting Text Retrieval Route
March 16, 2011
Healthcare researchers now have a valuable tool at their disposal, asserts eWeek.com in “IBM Collaborates with BJC, WUSM on Health Care Data Analytics.”
Working with BJC Healthcare and the Washington University School of Medicine Center for Biometrics, IBM is using its content analytics for good, extracting medical data from a whopping 50 million documents, including clinical notes, electronic health records, and diagnostic reports:
By being able to extract key data from up to 50 million documents in medical records, BJC and WUSM will be able to increase the speed of research, and therefore boost patient care. ‘You can never read 50 million documents and understand what the trends and patterns were across 50 million documents; it’s impossible,’ Rhinehart explained. ‘You couldn’t even take 500 people to do it, because there is never an efficient way to consistently understand the behavior in those documents and then figure out all the trends and patterns’.
The assembled information can be used to draw conclusions or test a hypothesis, for example. It’s about time semantic technology was applied to medical research. What better field?
Now we have some observations. First, applying semantic or other next generation search methods to medical content is somewhat less onerous than trying to figure out colloquial blog posts in Farsi. Second, IBM sells Lucene as OmniFind 9. If the technology is up to medical snuff, IBM needs to apply this method to its Web site’s search and retrieval. We find the access to IBM content on IBM’s own Web site sufficiently frustrating to give me a headache. Third, IBM is sending mixed messages. Is it search, text mining, data mining, or game show winning?
We think it is public relations and eWeek is happy to disseminate the joy.
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2011
Freebie unlike open source search wrapped in an OminFind package
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