Overview of the CLEF 2018 Consumer Health Search Task

This paper details the collection, systems and evaluation methods used in the CLEF 2018 eHealth Evaluation Lab, Consumer Health Search (CHS) task (Task 3). This task investigates the effectiveness of search engines in providing access to medical information present on the Web for people that have no or little medical knowledge. The task aims to foster advances in the development of search technologies for Consumer Health Search by providing resources and evaluation methods to test and validate search systems. Built upon the the 2013-17 series of CLEF eHealth Information Retrieval tasks, the 2018 task considers both mono- and multilingual retrieval, embracing the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) -style evaluation process with a shared collection of documents and queries, the contribution of runs from participants and the subsequent formation of relevance assessments and evaluation of the participants submissions. For this year, the CHS task uses a new Web corpus and a new set of queries compared to the previous years. The new corpus consists of Web pages acquired from the CommonCrawl and the new set of queries consists of 50 queries issued by the general public to the Health on the Net (HON) search services. We then manually translated the 50 queries to French, German, and Czech; and obtained English query variations of the 50 original queries. A total of 7 teams from 7 different countries participated in the 2018 CHS task: CUNI (Czech Republic), IMS Unipd (Italy), MIRACL (Tunisia), QUT (Australia), SINAI (Spain), UB-Botswana (Botswana), and UEvora (Portugal)

Overview of the CLEF 2018 Consumer Health Search Task

This paper details the collection, systems and evaluation methods used in the CLEF 2018 eHealth Evaluation Lab, Consumer Health Search (CHS) task (Task 3). This task investigates the effectiveness of search engines in providing access to medical information present on the Web for people that have no or little medical knowledge. The task aims to foster advances in the development of search technologies for Consumer Health Search by providing resources and evaluation methods to test and validate search systems. Built upon the the 2013-17 series of CLEF eHealth Information Retrieval tasks, the 2018 task considers both mono- and multilingual retrieval, embracing the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) -style evaluation process with a shared collection of documents and queries, the contribution of runs from participants and the subsequent formation of relevance assessments and evaluation of the participants submissions. For this year, the CHS task uses a new Web corpus and a new set of queries compared to the previous years. The new corpus consists of Web pages acquired from the CommonCrawl and the new set of queries consists of 50 queries issued by the general public to the Health on the Net (HON) search services. We then manually translated the 50 queries to French, German, and Czech; and obtained English query variations of the 50 original queries. A total of 7 teams from 7 different countries participated in the 2018 CHS task: CUNI (Czech Republic), IMS Unipd (Italy), MIRACL (Tunisia), QUT (Australia), SINAI (Spain), UB-Botswana (Botswana), and UEvora (Portugal)

Payoffs and pitfalls in using knowledge‑bases for consumer health search

Consumer health search (CHS) is a challenging domain with vocabulary mismatch and considerable domain expertise hampering peoples’ ability to formulate effective queries. We posit that using knowledge bases for query reformulation may help alleviate this problem. How to exploit knowledge bases for effective CHS is nontrivial, involving a swathe of key choices and design decisions (many of which are not explored in the literature). Here we rigorously empirically evaluate the impact these different choices have on retrieval effectiveness. A state-of-the-art knowledge-base retrieval model—the Entity Query Feature Expansion model—was used to evaluate these choices, which include: which knowledge base to use (specialised vs. general purpose), how to construct the knowledge base, how to extract entities from queries and map them to entities in the knowledge base, what part of the knowledge base to use for query expansion, and if to augment the knowledge base search process with relevance feedback. While knowledge base retrieval has been proposed as a solution for CHS, this paper delves into the finer details of doing this effectively, highlighting both payoffs and pitfalls. It aims to provide some lessons to others in advancing the state-of-the-art in CHS

Overview of the ImageCLEF 2018 Caption Prediction Tasks

The caption prediction task is in 2018 in its second edition after the task was first run in the same format in 2017. For 2018 the database was more focused on clinical images to limit diversity. As automatic methods with limited manual control were used to select images, there is still an important diversity remaining in the image data set. Participation was relatively stable compared to 2017. Usage of external data was restricted in 2018 to limit critical remarks regarding the use of external resources by some groups in 2017. Results show that this is a difficult task but that large amounts of training data can make it possible to detect the general topics of an image from the biomedical literature. For an even better comparison it seems important to filter the concepts for the images that are made available. Very general concepts (such as “medical image”) need to be removed, as they are not specific for the images shown, and also extremely rare concepts with only one or two examples can not really be learned. Providing more coherent training data or larger quantities can also help to learn such complex models

Health Cards to Assist Decision Making in Consumer Health Search

We investigate the effectiveness of health cards to assist decision making in Consumer Health Search (CHS). A health card is a concise presentation of a health concept shown along side search results to specific queries. We specifically focus on the decision making tasks of determining the health condition presented by a person and determining which action should be taken next with respect to the health condition. We explore two avenues for presenting health cards: a traditional single health card interface, and a novel multiple health cards interface. To validate the utility of health cards and their presentation interfaces, we conduct a laboratory user study where users are asked to solve the two decision making tasks for eight simulated scenarios. Our study makes the following contributions: (1) it proposes the novel multiple health card interface, which allows users to perform differential diagnoses, (2) it quantifies the impact of using health cards for assisting decision making in CHS, and (3) it determines the health card appraisal accuracy in the context of multiple health cards

Shangri-La: a medical case-based retrieval tool

Large amounts of medical visual data are produced in hospitals daily and made available continuously via publications in the scientific literature, representing the medical knowledge. However, it is not always easy to find the desired information and in clinical routine the time to fulfil an information need is often very limited. Information retrieval systems are a useful tool to provide access to these documents/images in the biomedical literature related to information needs of medical professionals. Shangri–La is a medical retrieval system that can potentially help clinicians to make decisions on difficult cases. It retrieves articles from the biomedical literature when querying a case description and attached images. The system is based on a multimodal retrieval approach with a focus on the integration of visual information connected to text. The approach includes a query–adaptive multimodal fusion criterion that analyses if visual features are suitable to be fused with text for the retrieval. Furthermore, image modality information is integrated in the retrieval step. The approach is evaluated using the ImageCLEFmed 2013 medical retrieval benchmark and can thus be compared to other approaches. Results show that the final approach outperforms the best multimodal approach submitted to ImageCLEFmed 2013

Query expansion strategies for laypeople-centred health information retrieval

One of the most common activities on the web is the research for health information. This activity has been gaining popularity among users, but the majority of them have no training in health care, which leads to difficulties in understanding the terminology and contents of documents.In the field of health information retrieval various investigations have been carried out, which resulted in methodologies that offer solutions to improve the quality of the retrieval documents. One of the most covered techniques in this area is the query expansion, that solves one of the biggest difficulties for users in the search of health information: the limited knowledge of medical terminology. This lack of knowledge influence the formulation of queries and the expectations of the retrieval documents. The query expansion complements the original query with additional terms, making it more reliable. These new terms can be obtained through thesaurus containing several terms associated with a medical concept.The amount of research conducted on the issue of readability of the documents is greatly reduced, the most developed subject is relevance, but if a document is relevant and the user does not comprehend it's contents it ceases to be useful.In this thesis it will be proposed a methodology to improve the quality of the retrieval documents, using methods to improve the users queries, such as the query expansion, and it will be used Readability formulas to determine the level of education required to understand a document. Will be conducted several tests to determine if the source to be used in the query expansion and the readability will have an effect in the retrieval process. These tests will be evaluated with precision and NDCG in the case of relevance, and in the case of readability it will be used uRBP

Overview of ImageCLEFcaption 2017 – Image Caption Prediction and Concept Detection for Biomedical Images

This paper presents an overview of the ImageCLEF 2017 caption tasks on the analysis of images from the biomedical literature. Two subtasks were proposed to the participants: a concept detectiontask and caption prediction task, both using only images as input. Thetwo subtasks tackle the problem of providing image interpretation by extracting concepts and predicting a caption based on the visual information of an image alone. A dataset of 184,000 figure-caption pairs from the biomedical open access literature (PubMed Central) are provided asa testbed with the majority of them as training data and then 10,000 as validation and 10,000 as test data. Across two tasks, 11 participating groups submitted 71 runs. While the domain remains challenging and the data highly heterogeneous, we can note some surprisingly good results of the difficult task with a quality that could be beneficial for health applications by better exploiting the visual content of biomedical figures