Briefs

Medgadget, November 20, 2007. Navigating through the open waters of published medical articles is a difficult proposition. Millions of articles, complicated keywords (often spelled differently, or with arcane abbreviations and acronyms), thousands of publications, all that makes a web of knowledge virtually impossible to mine and use effectively at the point of care. Even such powerful tools as PubMed itself often return tens of thousands of results for common keywords. CureHunter, Inc., a Portland, Oregon company, plans to change all that with its online automated tool to perform meta-analysis of the medical literature in real time.

Medgadget had a chance to talk to Judge Schonfeld, CEO of CureHunter, and a main architect of the company's artificial intelligence-based medical text mining system, called CureHunter Discovery Engine.

Schonfeld is an executive and scientist with a 40-year career in applied computational linguistics , formerly with UCLA's Semantic Foundations Team. He describes CureHunter not just as a search engine that returns all the possible results, but rather as an intelligent language-based medical text mining system developed to read the entire Medline archive of the US National Library of Medicine, to automatically extract the key evidence of successful clinical outcomes and present it in easy to read format.

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