User Experience in Medical Search Engines

Robert Andri Kristjansson

AbstractFindZebra.com is a specialized search engine for rare diseases that has been developed to as an improvement to standard search engines. FindZebra.com has been shown to improve diagnostic quality when compared to traditional search engines. We believe that while improving the relevance of results in a search, the presentation of results and interaction with the search engine are equally important. In its current form, the results in FindZebra.com are presented as raw text from articles as well as ranking of the results likelihood to match the query.
Web search engines are now the second most frequently used online computer application [29] and a wide range of innovative interface ideas have been developed. The goal of the project is to improve user interactions on the FindZebra.com website using state of the art user experience engineering methods as well as machine learning for customised results.
Faceted navigation using symptoms extracted with machine learning algorithms has been designed, implemented and tested in real life settings using diagnostic cases to evaluate the performance of the feature. The faceted navigation has been tested against pagination and shown to be an improvement in medical cases that prove difficult in retrieval for the search engine. In addition to the faceted navigation, the display of results has been improved by grouping multiple instances of the same disease together.
TypeMaster's thesis [Academic thesis]
Year2014
PublisherTechnical University of Denmark, Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science
AddressRichard Petersens Plads, Building 324, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark, compute@compute.dtu.dk
SeriesDTU Compute M.Sc.-2014
NoteDTU supervisor: Ole Winther, olwi@dtu.dk, DTU Compute.
Electronic version(s)[pdf]
Publication linkhttp://www.compute.dtu.dk/English.aspx
BibTeX data [bibtex]
IMM Group(s)Intelligent Signal Processing