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Combining classifiers for robust PICO element detection.

Background: Formulating a clinical information need in terms of the four atomic parts which are Population/Problem, Intervention, Comparison and Outcome (known as PICO elements) facilitates searching for a precise answer within a large medical citation database. However, using PICO defined items in...

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Published in:BMC Medical Informatics & Decision Making Vol. 10; no. 1; pp. 29 - 30
Main Authors: Boudin F, Nie JY, Bartlett JC, Grad R, Pluye P, Dawes M, Boudin, Florian, Nie, Jian-Yun, Bartlett, Joan C, Grad, Roland, Pluye, Pierre, Dawes, Martin
Format: research Journal Article
Published: BioMed Central 2010
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        10.1186/1472-6947-10-29
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        atl: Combining classifiers for robust PICO element detection.
      aug:
        au:
          Boudin F
          Nie JY
          Bartlett JC
          Grad R
          Pluye P
          Dawes M
          Boudin, Florian
          Nie, Jian-Yun
          Bartlett, Joan C
          Grad, Roland
          Pluye, Pierre
          Dawes, Martin
        affil: DIRO, University of Montreal, CP. 6128, succursale Centre-ville, Montreal, H3C 3J7 Quebec, Canada
      sug:
        subj:
          Abstracting and Indexing Classification
          Algorithms
          Information Retrieval Methods
          Reference Databases
      ab: Background: Formulating a clinical information need in terms of the four atomic parts which are Population/Problem, Intervention, Comparison and Outcome (known as PICO elements) facilitates searching for a precise answer within a large medical citation database. However, using PICO defined items in the information retrieval process requires a search engine to be able to detect and index PICO elements in the collection in order for the system to retrieve relevant documents.Methods: In this study, we tested multiple supervised classification algorithms and their combinations for detecting PICO elements within medical abstracts. Using the structural descriptors that are embedded in some medical abstracts, we have automatically gathered large training/testing data sets for each PICO element.Results: Combining multiple classifiers using a weighted linear combination of their prediction scores achieves promising results with an f-measure score of 86.3% for P, 67% for I and 56.6% for O.Conclusions: Our experiments on the identification of PICO elements showed that the task is very challenging. Nevertheless, the performance achieved by our identification method is competitive with previously published results and shows that this task can be achieved with a high accuracy for the P element but lower ones for I and O elements.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
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        research
        Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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