Information retrieval for healthcare

Although most work in Healthcare Data Analytics focuses on mining and analyzing data from patients, another vast trove of information for use in this process includes scientific data and literature. The techniques most commonly used to access this day include those from the field of information retrieval (IR), sometimes called search. IR is the field concerned with the acquisition, organization, and searching of knowledge-based information, which is usually defined as information derived and organized from observational or experimental research [60, 66]. Although IR in biomedicine traditionally concentrated on the retrieval of text from the biomedical literature, the purview of content covered has expanded to include newer types of media that include images, video, chemical structures, gene and protein sequences, and a wide range of other digital media of relevance to biomedical education, research, and patient care. With the proliferation of IR systems and online content, even the notion of the library has changed substantially, with the new digital library emerging [90].