FindMeEvidence aims to be a simple, yet highly effective search engine for medical professionals (MIE2014, Istanbul, Turkey)

1. The FindMeEvidence project
An open-source, mobile-friendly search engine
for public medical knowledge
Matthias SAMWALDa, Allan HANBURYb.
a Medical University of Vienna, Austria
b Vienna University of Technology, Austria

2. Many physicians access the web during
patient consultations
Matthias Samwald, Marlene Kritz, Manfred Gschwandtner, Veronika Stefanov, Allan Hanbury.
„An open, trustworthy and multilingual search engine for medical practitioners“ MIE2011

3. But they are confronted with several barriers to using
current web search engines in an effective way
Matthias Samwald, Marlene Kritz, Manfred Gschwandtner, Veronika Stefanov, Allan Hanbury.
„An open, trustworthy and multilingual search engine for medical practitioners“ MIE2011

4. And they would rather prefer not to pay to have these
problems fixed…
Matthias Samwald, Marlene Kritz, Manfred Gschwandtner, Veronika Stefanov, Allan Hanbury.
„An open, trustworthy and multilingual search engine for medical practitioners“ MIE2011

5. Insight: Improving the availability of free, open,
mobile-friendly medical search engines is extremely
valuable for medical professionals & quality of care!
• To this end, we are developing the FindMeEvidence
search engine system
• FindMeEvidence is an open-source medical search
engine based on medical content on the web
• Optimized for efficient use in time-constrained medical
practice
• Small footprint, easy to maintain and customize to local
content requirements

6. FindMeEvidence aims to be a simple,
yet highly effective search engine for medical
professionals
• Simple user interface
• Enabling rapid synthesis of evidence for medical decision
support
o Do you also like it when the answer you searched for is already shown
in the Google result snippet? It should be like that all the time.
• Accessible on all devices (especially mobile)
• Complementing, not replacing
Google & PubMed

7. Very simple user interface

8. Autocomplete via PubMed API
(Appears vastly more practical than all vocabulary/taxonomy-based autocomplete methodologies)

9. Options for result filtering are kept simple as well

10. Contains only English content, but offers query
translation support to make content better accessible
• Physicians self-reported good English skills in our Europe-wide
study
• But active vocabulary might not be as good, so we assist
query formulation

14. Where available, key findings of articles in PubMed
are shown directly in search results list

15. Local abbreviations in the abstracts are expanded for
improving these previews of key findings
In abstract (note abbreviations)
In preview (note automatically expanded abbreviations; would not be legible otherwise)

16. Open-access signalling and linking
• FindMeEvidence aims to signal the open-access status of
publications to users
• Great aid for users without institutional access
(i.e., most non-academic medical settings)
• Direct link to mobile-friendly articles (PMC PubReader)

17. Quality signalling
• Wikipedia is included due to popular demand and real
practical benefits (very good for getting quick overview)
• However, quality of Wikipedia articles varies
substantially
• Measures are taken to notify users of potential problems
with content quality of certain articles

20. We will never replace Google and PubMed. So let‘s try
to play nice with them!
Links to query results in Google / PubMed at bottom of page

21. Preliminary evaluation: Comparison with state-of-the-art
search engine for evidence-based medicine
User query Inferred information need FindMeEvidence met
success criteria
TRIP Database met success
criteria
flexible bronchoscopy General information about
treatment
no yes
paclitaxel + doxorubicin
cardiotoxicity
Specific drug side effects
(Were they reported? How
significant are they? Can this
problem be addressed?)
yes yes
uterine fibroids risk factors Risk factors for specific
condition
yes no
acute liver failure General information, especially
about diagnosis and treatment
yes no
ssri sexual General information about
sexuality-related drug side
effects of SSRIs
yes no
Viral induced wheeze General information about
symptom
yes yes
streptococcal pharyngitis AND
child
Diagnosis/treatment in
pediatric population
yes yes
mirtazapine AND hepatitis Drug side effect or information
on how to tailor treatment
when comorbidity present
No no
… … … …
Excerpt of evaluation queries. Queries were selected from search logs of TRIP Database and PubMed.

22. Preliminary evaluation:
Search results of FindMeEvidence are competitive
• Checked if at least one result in first 5 results met
information need of test query (no facets selected)
• Out of all test queries (N = 36), FindMeEvidence results
met success criteria for 25 (69,4%) of the queries, while
TRIP Database results met criteria for only 17 (47,2%) of
the queries.
• Only a very limited preliminary evaluation! Does not
prove superiority, but suggests that FindMeEvidence can
be of practical use.

23. Wrapping up:
How does all that relate to you?

24. Wrapping up:
How does all that relate to you?
• You can use FindMeEvidence.org search engine at your
institution, or create a local installation customized to
your needs!
• We are looking for organisations to partner in evaluating
and improving the system  opportunity for research
papers!

25. Join open-source project on Github

26. Thanks!
Local team
Dr. Matthias Samwald (FindMeEvidence team lead)
Georg Petz (MSc student, core developer of Version >1.0)
Dr. Claus-Dieter Volko
Dr. Veronika Stefanov (Khresmoi project)
Dr. Allan Hanbury (Khresmoi project scientific coordinator)
Web
http://FindMeEvidence.org/ (currently still V1.0, will be upgraded to V1.1 in coming weeks)
https://github.com/matthias-samwald/find-me-evidence (feel free to fork and/or contribute!)
Contact
matthias.samwald @ meduniwien.ac.at
Funding
European Union Seventh Framework Programme agreement No. 257528 (KHRESMOI)
Austrian Science Fund (FWF): [PP 25608-N15]

27. Extra slides

28. FindMeEvidence is based on simple key technologies
• Apache Solr 4
o Industry-strength search server with wide support and
user-base
• JQuery mobile
o Cross-platform, mobile-friendly web user interface library
• PHP

30. We developed a methodologies for selecting clinically
relevant content from PubMed and Wikipedia
• PubMed: Approx. 600 journals included, approx 700.000
articles
o Selection is needed for excluding vast number of
preclinical study results on PubMed
• Wikipedia: Articles belonging to Wikiprojects Medicine
and Pharmacology

31. Only highly relevant information for decision support
shown in result lists
• Title
• Journal (to judge relevance and quality)
• Publication date (to judge actuality)
• Key assertions (click needed for abstract / full text)
Deliberately not shown:
o Author names (only matters for detailed scientific
research, you would use PubMed for that anyways)
o Keywords, tags
o Bibliographic ‚metacrap‘