Skip to main content
Download PDF

Volume 9 Supplement 1

7th European Conference on Rare Diseases and Orphan Products (ERCD 2014)

  • Oral presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

FindZebra - the search engine for difficult medical cases

Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases volume 9, Article number: O5 (2014) Cite this article

Physicians as well as laypeople use both general purpose and specialised web-based search tools when confronted with medical questions. FindZebra.com is a tool for generating hypotheses about rare disease diagnosis. It uses freely available high quality curated information on rare diseases and open source information retrieval software (Apache Lucene Solr) tailored to the problem. FindZebra is intended primarily for physicians and other professionals concerned with diagnosis of rare diseases. Our benchmarking against several search tools (Google search, PubMed and http://omim.org) shows that FindZebra has higher performance in retrieving the correct diagnosis when queried with symptoms [1, 2]. Our findings indicate that the ranking algorithm used is the most important factor for the success.

References

  1. Dragusin Radu, Petcu Paula, Lioma Christina, Larsen Birger, Jørgensen Henrik L, Cox Ingemar, Hansen Lars K, Ingwersen Peter, Winther Ole: FindZebra: a Search Engine for Rare Diseases. International Journal of Medical Informatics, IJMI. 2013

    Google Scholar 

  2. Dragusin Radu, Petcu Paula, Lioma Christina, Larsen Birger, Jørgensen Henrik L, Cox Ingemar, Hansen Lars K, Ingwersen Peter, Winther Ole: Specialised tools are needed when searching the web for rare disease diagnoses. Rare Diseases. 2013

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department for Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Lyngby, 2800, Denmark

    Ole Winther, Dan Svenstrup, Philip P Henningsen & Róbert Kristiásson

  2. Copenhagen University Hospital, Department of Clinical Biochemistry, Bispebjerg Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Henrik L Jørgensen

Authors
  1. Ole Winther
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Dan Svenstrup
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Philip P Henningsen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Róbert Kristiásson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Henrik L Jørgensen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ole Winther.

Rights and permissions

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Winther, O., Svenstrup, D., Henningsen, P.P. et al. FindZebra - the search engine for difficult medical cases. Orphanet J Rare Dis 9 (Suppl 1), O5 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/1750-1172-9-S1-O5

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1750-1172-9-S1-O5

Keywords

Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases

ISSN: 1750-1172