Evaluating the web as a clinical knowledge base

Abstract

Medical diagnostic decision support systems are some of the most visible applications of medical informatics. Many of these systems, however, were created in the pre-WWW era, when access to clinical knowledge was much more limited than it is currently. Using the Google(tm) Java API1, we created a simple program to extract potential diagnoses from a general web search. Our system performed at a level comparable to other medical expert systems.