Yottalook is a Google inspired radiology search engine with a similarly math inspired name.
What is a Yotta?
A Yotta is a really big number. It is a SI (system of units) prefix denoting 1024 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. As of 2006, yotta is the largest and last SI prefix to be confirmed. For example, earth weighs 5977 yottagrams. (Wikipedia)
What is Yottalook?
Yottalook is a free radiology-centric search engine based on Google’s indexing technology with proprietary relevance algorithm by iVirtuoso. Currently, Yottalook Images and Yottalook References search engines are available for use. Yottalook Image has specially been designed to search radiology images from various peer-reviewed online sources and currently has access to over 100,000 images. Yottalook References has been designed to search online radiology sources only. Try various refinement options to narrow your search requests even further.
Yottalook is the brain child of Steve Severance, an engineer in Maryland’s VA Health Care System. Mr. Severance was frustrated by the poor quality of search results when looking for complicated medical information.
When attempting to quickly navigate the Invisible Web to find radiologic information, users are stuck with two choices: Spend extra time searching separately on various medical Web sites and teaching resources such as RSNA’s Medical Imaging Resource Center (MIRC), or flail blindly about on a commercial search engine in hopes of snagging a relevant hit out of hundreds or thousands of returns.
Attempting to “connect people with content,” Severance’s team used a search crawler to scan the Internet — including invisible sites — collect pages with some sort of radiologic content and download them into a database. The crawler was initially “seeded” with pages from RadiologyEducation.com as a way of giving the crawler the sort of raw textual materials it needed to determine what did and did not constitute radiologic information, Severance said. Once the crawler knew what it was looking for, the downloaded content was then indexed using Google’s PageRank algorithm and a text classifier to extract relevant search terms. The result, Severance said, is a search engine that not only gets into sites and content that commercial engines usually skip over, but also presents results in a ranked order that better emphasize their relevance to the user’s search. In testing, the radiologic search engine was 92% effective at finding relevant teaching file materials.
However, Scan Man notes that there is another excellent radiographic search engine known as Gold Miner. Both are superb sites, each with its own pro’s and con’s. YottaLook has the look and feel of Google, complete with added sub-categories, yet doesn’t provide image previews, nor is it Firefox friendly. Gold Miner does provide image previews and short, highly relevant summaries, yet lacks links to more in depth information.
Regardless, both sites will come in extremely handy the next time you’re trying to put together a presentation last minute and you need radiographic images.
Read more here . . .
(hat tip: Cat Scan Man)
