Retrieving Medical Records Using Bayesian Networks

Bayesian networks (Jensen, 2001) are powerful tools for dealing with uncertainty. They have been successfully applied in a wide range of domains where this property is an important feature, as in the case of information retrieval (IR) (Turtle & Croft, 1991). This field (Baeza-Yates & Ribeiro-Neto, 1999) is concerned with the representation, storage, organization, and accessing of information items (the textual representation of any kind of object). Uncertainty is also present in this field, and, consequently, several approaches based on these probabilistic graphical models have been designed in an attempt to represent documents and their contents (expressed by means of indexed terms), and the relationships between them, so as to retrieve as many relevant documents as possible, given a query submitted by a user.