Specialized Search Engine Helps Diagnose Rare Diseases
April 3, 2013
A recent piece from the MIT Technology Review that examines “The Rare Disease Search Engine That Outperforms Google” compares apples with oranges. The real takeaway is much bigger than a swipe at Google—that technical innovation is being used to help humanity.
Rare diseases are notoriously difficult to diagnose, and medical professionals have been using an Internet search engine, usually Google, to help with the process for years. Of course, Google was not designed for that use, so researchers have created a tailor-made engine to streamline this difficult but essential task. The article informs us:
“Radu Dragusin at the Technical University of Denmark and a few pals unveil an alternative. These guys have set up a bespoke search engine dedicated to the diagnosis of rare diseases called FindZebra, a name based on the common medical slang [“zebra”]for a rare disease. After comparing the results from this engine against the same searches on Google, they show that it is significantly better at returning relevant results.”
Is this supposed to be a surprise? Google does ads, not rare diseases. Ah well, the important thing is that doctors have a powerful new tool to help folks with diseases that stoutly defy accurate identification. How did the team from the Technical University of Denmark do it? The write-up goes on to say:
“The magic sauce in FindZebra is the index it uses to hunt for results. These guys have created this index by crawling a specially selected set of curated databases on rare diseases. . . . They then use the open source information retrieval tool Indri to search this index via a website with a conventional search engine interface. The result is FindZebra.”
Though the zebra engine is still an in-progress research project, the team has made it publically available at www.findzebra.com. Medical professionals can already use the innovation to help patients who might otherwise be doomed to years of painful frustration. Hooray, progress!
Cynthia Murrell, April 03, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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