Implementation of information retrieval service for Korean spine database with degenerative spinal disease

Abstract

Many people are interested in medical information because they want to take care of their health by themselves. Thus, some institutions provide medical term search services to help their understanding about difficult medical terms. However, those services are suffered from the low quality of search results because simple keyword search technologies are applied to medical term databases and Web sites. To prevent unnecessary spinal surgery and to support scientific diagnosis of spinal diseases and systematic prediction of treatment effects, we have been developing e-spine, which is a computerized simulation model of human spines. In this paper, as a background data for realizing e-spine, we have collected spine data from 77 cadavers and 298 patients with normal spine or degenerative spinal diseases. The spine data consists of 2D images such as CT, MRI, or X-ray, 3D shapes, geometry data and property data. Especially, we propose our database and the bioinformatics linked data based spine information retrieval service that provides more user-friendly services and very precise results. To provide abundant medical knowledge, our service provides search results of MeSH, OMIM, UniProt, GeneOntology and DBpedia. Also, the search results of PubMed are displayed to provide the related papers and books. As a result, our database will offer great value and utility in the diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation of patients suffering from spinal diseases. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.