The MiPACQ clinical question answering system

AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2011:2011:171-80. Epub 2011 Oct 22.

Abstract

The Multi-source Integrated Platform for Answering Clinical Questions (MiPACQ) is a QA pipeline that integrates a variety of information retrieval and natural language processing systems into an extensible question answering system. We present the system's architecture and an evaluation of MiPACQ on a human-annotated evaluation dataset based on the Medpedia health and medical encyclopedia. Compared with our baseline information retrieval system, the MiPACQ rule-based system demonstrates 84% improvement in Precision at One and the MiPACQ machine-learning-based system demonstrates 134% improvement. Other performance metrics including mean reciprocal rank and area under the precision/recall curves also showed significant improvement, validating the effectiveness of the MiPACQ design and implementation.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Systems
  • Electronic Health Records*
  • Humans
  • Information Systems
  • Natural Language Processing*
  • Search Engine*
  • Software*