On the Performance of Medical Information Retrieval using MeSH Terms – A Survey

Abstract

Internet users have increased everywhere. Searching and retrieving documents is a common thing nowadays. Retrieving related documents from the search engines are difficult task. To retrieve correct documents, knowledge about the search topic is essential. Even though separate search engines are there to retrieve medical documents the users are not familiar with MeSH terms (Medical Subject Heading). So, both the search browser and the MeSH terms have to be integrated to make the search effective and efficient. To implement this integration, SimpleMed and MeSHMed were introduced. The MeSH terms have to be ranked to know how frequently it has been used and to know the importance of the MeSH terms. To rank it a semi – automated tool called MeSHy was developed. The terms were extracted, filtered, ranked and displayed to the user. Classifiers have to be constructed to label the documents as health and non – health. Three strategies were used to classify them. The errors that are commonly done by the users have to be found out. It was calculated based on the queries presented by the user to the search browser.

Keywords

• Medical Information
• MeSH
• SimpleMed