The AMTEx approach in the medical document indexing and retrieval application

AMTEx is a medical document indexing method, specifically designed for the automatic indexing of documents in large medical collections, such as MEDLINE, the premier bibliographic database of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM). AMTEx combines MeSH, the terminological thesaurus resource of NLM, with a well-established method for extraction of terminology, the C/NC-value method. The performance evaluation of two AMTEx configurations is measured against the current state-of-the-art, the MetaMap Transfer (MMTx) method in four experiments, using two types of corpora: a subset of MEDLINE (PMC) full document corpus and a subset of MEDLINE (OHSUMED) abstracts, for each of the indexing and retrieval tasks, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that AMTEx performs better in indexing in 20–50% of the processing time compared to MMTx, while for the retrieval task, AMTEx performs better in the full text (PMC) corpus.