Yottalook is free radiology-centric web search engine and was designed to provide the practicing radiologists with the most important and relevant information at the time of patient care. The search engine is based on natural query analysis, semantic ontology and ranking algorithms powered by iVirtuoso. The thesaurus of medical terminologies is supported by the Radiology Society of North America and based on RadLex system (uniform radiology imaging indexing architecture).
Currently Yottalook allows the user to search online radiology sources with Yottalook Web; search radiology images from various peer-reviewed online sources (currently with access to over 750,000 images) with Yottalook Images; search more than a 1000 online anatomic or radiographic atlases with Yottalook Anatomy, and Yottalook Book search filters Google Books search results to provide links to radiology or imaging related books. With Yottalook Books, you can read relevant content from over 5000 full-text radiology books online. Check out the Online Demo of Yottalook to preview the functionality of the site or read more on the YottaLook Blog.
The search engine is robust and provides rapid, relevant and reasonably accurate search results from a comprehensive series of radiology orientated texts. I particularly like the integrated translation module providing search in 33 different languages and the iGoogle search app, However the site is still in beta production and there are still some glitches to be ironed out.
Overall I like the accuracy and relevance of the returned search results, and the associated provision of useful text – especially the image search with Yottalook Images. However any search based on free web-based resources leads to a collection of only moderate to high quality images with the majority of the returned results requiring a subscription to view. This problem is partially overcome in the hospital setting with IP specific subscriptions to archives such as Imaging Consult, RadioGraphics and other journals – but makes it impossible to revise or review information when away from work.
About Mike Cadogan
