Goldminer.arrs.org - Intelligent Medical Imagery Searc

Using its Unified Medical Language System, ARRS GoldMiner is an intelligent medical imagery search engine that recognizes medical terms, abbreviations, synonyms and their relationship to one another. To find images, simply type in the keywords that describe a disease, imaging finding or an anatomic feature, and ARRS GoldMiner does the rest. Unlike common search engines, Goldminer is programmed to understand medical terminology and knows that for example kidney stones and renal calculi are the same thing and that renal calculi are a type of kidney disease. There are plenty of filtering options for your search including by age, sex and image type.

“ARRS GoldMiner™ provides instant access to images published in selected peer-reviewed radiology journals. This new, web-based system allows viewers to search for images by findings, anatomy, imaging technique, and patient age and sex.”

This could become a popular tool for both doctors and patients interested in finding relevant images easily and without paying for them. The truth is that regular search engines do a poor job of understanding the relation between medical terms and ARRS Goldminer is a huge step forward.

What other applications could they work on that could exploit this advance in semantic search offered by the Goldminer? Perhaps extending it to enable searching for other types of files and not just images would be a logical next step?