Summary
Objectives: This focus theme deals with the various aspects of health information search that
are necessary to cope with the challenges of an increasing amount and complexity of
medical information currently produced.
Methods: This editorial reviews the main challenges of health information search and summarizes
the five papers of this focus theme.
Results and Conclusions: The five papers of the focus theme cover a large part of the current challenges in
health information search such as coding standards, information extraction from complex
data, user requirements analysis, multimedia data analysis and the access to big data.
Several future challenges are identified such as the combination of visual and textual
data for information search and the difficulty to scale when analyzing big data.
Keywords
Health information search - information retrieval - knowledge bases - terminologies
