An Architecture for Information Retrieval in a Telemedicine System

This work presents an information retrieval architecture developed for the Santa Catarina State Telemedicine System. This architecture employs DICOM Structured Reporting, controlled vocabularies for data catalogization and a specially developed search engine for data indexing and storing. Results of our case study show that searches can be performed much faster with the proposed search mechanism and that the precision of results is acceptable in most cases. In some searches, irrelevant items within the 15 first results were identified. This occurred partially because search terms found in the additional free text observations inserted into the findings reports were treated with the same relevance as formally diagnostically relevant items of the DICOM SR structure and, partially because the semantics of negations associated to search terms in the findings reports were not taken into consideration.