Voting Techniques for a Multi-terminology Based Biomedical Information Retrieval

We are interested in retrieving relevant information from biomedical documents according to healthcare professional’s information needs. It is well known that biomedical documents are indexed using conceptual descriptors issued from terminologies for a better retrieval performance. Our attempt to develop a conceptual retrieval framework relies on the hypothesis that there are several broad categories of knowledge that could be captured from different terminologies and processed by retrieval algorithms. With this in mind, we propose a multi-terminology based indexing approach for selecting the best representative concepts for each document. We instantiate this general approach on four terminologies namely MeSH (Medical Subject Headings), SNOMED (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine), ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases) and GO (Gene Ontology). Experimental studies were conducted on large and official document test collections of real world clinical queries and associated judgments extracted from MEDLINE scientific collections, namely TREC Genomics 2004 & 2005. The obtained results demonstrate the advantages of our multi-terminology based biomedical information retrieval approach over state-of-the art approaches.