Elasticsearch engine in medicine

A technical survey

Abstract

Informatization has affected all spheres of the national life, including medicine. One of the areas of medicine informatization is the introduction of information systems. Elasticsearch (ES) is an search engine. It is used to store and search data in information systems. We analyzed 34 scientific articles on the use cases of ES in medicine, published in 2022-2024. Articles was filtered by type, description of use of ES, the English language, and free access. Our findings are following. ES is used primarily for searching and logging. In 41% of articles ES is used as a database management system (DBMS) that stores only part of the data, in 34% – as a primary DBMS, in 25% – as a secondary DBMS. On average, researchers store almost 2 million documents in a ES index. Redis, Apache Nifi, CogStack, Apache Kafka, Neo4j, PostgreSQL, Python are most often used with ES. We have collected some technical details of using ES (analyzers, data types, query types). ES is used with medical databases and tools such as UMLS, MedCAT, MeSH, SNOMED-CT.