Finding relevant literature underpins the practice of evidence-based medicine. From 2014 to 2016, TREC conducted a clinical decision support track, wherein participants were tasked with finding articles relevant to clinical questions posed by physicians. In total, 87 teams have participated over the past three years, generating 395 runs. During this period, each team has trialled a variety of methods. While there was significant overlap in the methods employed by different teams, the results were varied. Due to the diversity of the platforms used, the results arising from the different techniques are not directly comparable, reducing the ability to build on previous work. By using a stable platform, we have been able to compare different document and query processing techniques, allowing us to experiment with different search parameters. We have used our system to reproduce leading teams runs, and compare the results obtained. By benchmarking our indexing and search techniques, we can statistically test a variety of hypotheses, paving the way for further research.
* Medical Information Retrieval TREC has a long history of running tracks in the medical domain, including the Genomics track (2003-2007), the Medical track on electronic health records (2011-2012), and the TREC Clinical Decision Support (CDS) track which ran for three years (2014-2016). The TREC CDS track aimed to facilitate the answering of clinical questions pertaining to better patient care @cite_13 . After the results are released, most teams publish a short report detailing their search methodology and results.
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Providing access to relevant biomedical literature in a clinical setting has the potential to bridge a critical gap in evidence-based medicine. Here, our goal is specifically to provide relevant articles to clinicians to improve their decision-making in diagnosing, treating, and testing patients. To this end, the TREC 2014 Clinical Decision Support Track evaluated a system's ability to retrieve relevant articles in one of three categories (Diagnosis, Treatment, Test) using an idealized form of a patient medical record . Over 100 submissions from over 25 participants were evaluated on 30 topics, resulting in over 37k relevance judgments. In this article, we provide an overview of the task, a survey of the information retrieval methods employed by the participants, an analysis of the results, and a discussion on the future directions for this challenging yet important task.