Intelligent information retrieval system: Merging basic and clinical science into a medical student learning program

We describe the Intelligent Information Retrieval System (IIRS) designed to support a medical school problem-based learning curriculum designed to integrate basic and clinical science teaching. It is sometimes hard for medical students to understand the importance of learning basic sciences such as physiology or biochemistry. Our system starts from a simulated patient with clinical features and helps medical students identify relevant reading materials and learning programs to help them learn case-related basic science information.; The learning resources include textbook material, published papers, faculty-written notes, web sites, and learning programs. A different agent will support retrieval from each of these different resources. Yet another agent models the student user and records transactions. We discuss the problem of indexing the subject matter of the learning programs so that the most appropriate program is retrieved.; A major component of IIRS is the customizable thesaurus, which maps clinical features to basic science terms. This is just one of the tools that we are creating to support the instructor in building the materials for the course. We improve the result of the retrieval process with shallow parsing.