Design and Implementation of a Specialized Meta Search Engine for Medical Information Retrieval

We present a new next generation domain of Medical Meta Search Engine called MMSE. MMSE is a medical meta search engine designed for the users with no medical expertise. It is enhanced with the domain knowledge obtained from Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) to increase the effectiveness of the searches. The power of this system is based on the ability to understand the semantics of web pages and the user queries. MMSE transforms a keyword search into a conceptual search. In this system, medical concepts are extracted from user query by UMLS web service, at first. Then the expanded query is sent to Yahoo, Bing and Gigablast search engines. The relevant results of user query are shown as ranked and clustered results. To evaluate our proposed system, the experiments were divided in three parts: expansion of user query, re-ranking results, overall performance of the system. The results of our experiments indicate that, expanding the user query with domain knowledge, such as using the synonyms and partially or contextually relevant terms from UMLS, increase dramatically the relevance of an answer set produced by MMSE and the number of retrieved web pages that are relevant to the user request.