Visual Clinical Decision Support

Medicine is one of the most information-intensive fields and potentially affects all of us. Of all exams, imaging has created the largest amount of data available to physicians often with great benefit but also with a risk of data overload. Finding the right information and making it available to the right persons at the right moment is a challenge. Visual information retrieval is also still much less explored than textual information retrieval. The use case will thus focus on the visual information retrieval aspects and the inclusion of images. The medical literature currently constitutes an enormous knowledge base that includes visual as well as textual information. Multilingual aspects equally play an important role in this domain as many people are more familiar with formulating information needs in their mother tongue even if they are understanding and speaking English, the language of most of the literature, well.

The use case will organize a lab at CLEF 2010 to analyze the quality that current retrieval technologies deliver on retrieval from the medical literature in several languages and more particularly how visual information analysis can be integrated into the process in the best possible way. The evaluation will include practical demonstrations of retrieval systems that allow showing potential benefits and usability of such tools.