Abstract
Similar cases retrieval from a database is useful, when a patient with an unfamiliar disease is treated. A database management system, therefore, for clinical cases on the WWW with self-organizing maps has been developed. Keywords are selected from case documents by natural language processing. As the same keywords are usually selected from similar cases, this database is especially available to retrieve similar cases. Similar cases, however, are not always found in case of the same few keywords. To overcome this problem, a new method has been proposed with which to modify input vectors by quantifying relationship between keywords using correlation coefficient. Computer simulations illustrated usefulness of the method in spite of the same few keywords. The future direction of this study will be an application to real clinical cases.
