Overview of the TREC 2012 Medical Records Track

Published

June 28, 2013

Author(s)

Ellen M. Voorhees, William Hersh

Abstract

The TREC Medical Records track fosters research that allows electronic health records to be retrieved based on the semantic content of free-text fields. The ability to find records by matching semantic content will enhance clinical care and support the secondary use of medical records in clinical trials and epidemiological studies. TREC 2012 is the sophomore year of the track, which attracted 24 participating reserach groups. The track repeated the cohort-finding task from its initial year. This task is an ad hoc search task in which systems search a set of de-identified clinical reports to identify cohorts for (hypothetical) clinical studies. A topic statement for the task describes the criteria for inclusion in a study, and a system returns a list of "visits" ordered by the likelihood that the inclusion criteria are satisfied. Physicians created fifty topics and performed relevance judgments for the track. Top-performing groups each used some sort of vocabulary normalization device specific to the medical domain, supporting the hypothesis that language use within electronic health records is sufficiently different from general use to warrant domain-specific processing. Such devices must be used carefully, however, as multiple groups also demonstrated that aggressive use harms baseline performance. Exploiting human expertise through manual query construction proved most effective.

Citation

Special Publication (NIST SP) - 500-298

Report Number

500-298

NIST Pub Series

Special Publication (NIST SP)

Pub Type

NIST Pubs

Download Paper

Local Download

Keywords

electronic health records, information retrieval, TREC

Citation

Voorhees, E. and Hersh, W. (2013), Overview of the TREC 2012 Medical Records Track, Special Publication (NIST SP), National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=913781 (Accessed April 18, 2024)