Nature-inspired query optimisation models for medical information retrieval with relevance feedback

Medical information retrieval (MedIR) involves retrieving relevant medical-related information from a set of medical documents for a particular user query. As the volume of medical records grows, the challenging problem is determining those documents which best suiting a given query by considering user satisfaction. Statistical term weighting and probabilistic approaches for this purpose have several limitations. The gap between information need and user query can be addressed through query optimisation and relevance feedback. In this paper, we propose a document retrieval framework that incorporates query optimisation using techniques like genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimisation (PSO), and global swarm optimisation (GSO). Further, we use relevance feedback methods to reformulate the user query. The proposed techniques are applied to datasets with predefined relevance judgments to perform quantitative validation. Experimental results using the relevance judgements available in the University of Glasgow's Medline collection underscored the significant improvement achieved using BM25 scores as the fitness function.