Information Discovery on Electronic Health Records Using Authority Flow Techniques

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Authority-flow techniques can greatly improve the detection of relevant information in EHRs and hence deserve further study.</p

Extracting k most important groups from data efficiently

We study an important data analysis operator, which extracts the k most important groups from data (i.e., the k groups with the highest aggregate values). In a data warehousing context, an example of the above query is "find the 10 combinations of product-type and month with the largest sum of sales". The problem is challenging as the potential number of groups can be much larger than the memory capacity. We propose on-demand methods for efficient top-k groups processing, under limited memory size. In particular, we design top-k groups retrieval techniques for three representative scenarios as follows. For the scenario with data physically ordered by measure, we propose the write-optimized multi-pass sorted access algorithm (WMSA), that exploits available memory for efficient top-k groups computation. Regarding the scenario with unordered data, we develop the recursive hash algorithm (RHA), which applies hashing with early aggregation, coupled with branch-and-bound techniques and derivation heuristics for tight score bounds of hash partitions. Next, we design the clustered groups algorithm (CGA), which accelerates top-k groups processing for the case where data is clustered by a subset of group-by attributes. Extensive experiments with real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the applicability and efficiency of the proposed algorithms. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.link_to_subscribed_fulltex