We present a probabilistic information retrieval IR model that incorporates epidemiological data and simple patient profiles that are composed of a patient's sex and age. This approach is intended to improve retrieval effectiveness in the health and medical domain. We evaluated our approach on the TREC Clinical Decision Support Track 2014. The new approach performed better than a baseline run, however at this time, we cannot report any statistically significant improvements.
['Tawan Sierek', 'Allan Hanbury']
Using Health Statistics to Improve Medical and Health Search