BRISBANE, Australia, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- Google, the world's most popular search engine, has helped Australian doctors diagnose difficult cases.
A research team at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane worried that medical knowledge was expanding more rapidly than practitioners could keep track of it and decided to try using Google to help them with tough cases.
They searched the 2005 issues of the New England Journal of Medicine for difficult diagnoses, including Cushing's syndrome and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease -- the human version of Mad Cow disease -- and selected three to five search terms from each case.
After concealing the conclusion, they submitted these terms to Google, and the searches produced the correct diagnosis in 58 percent of the cases.
The team concluded that Google could help determine the cause of conditions with unique symptoms that can be easily used as search terms, but the usefulness of the retrieved information would depend on the knowledge base of the practitioner making the investigation.
The study appears in the Nov. 9 issue of the British Medical Journal Online First.
