Designing an information retrieval system for the STT/SC

The Santa Catarina State Telemedicine and Telehealth System - STT/SC stores well over 2 million examinations and every month about 20 thousand new imaging exams are sent to the system database. As a significant part of the findings associated to these medical data are stored as text documents, the precise extraction of information is a difficult task. In the healthcare domain it is common to find different terms, some of them appearing as composed expressions, used to represent the same concept, whereas the existence of simple modifiers can turn an expression into another, different concept. This work presents an information retrieval architecture developed for the STT/SC. It consists in a module integrated into the STT/SC and was developed in order to support both experienced and inexperienced users to perform queries. Experiments were performed to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed system in real situations. Results show that the search can be performed more much faster and with acceptable precision.