  In this paper, we investigate how semantic relations between concepts
extracted from medical documents can be employed to improve the retrieval of
medical literature. Semantic relations explicitly represent relatedness between
concepts and carry high informative power that can be leveraged to improve the
effectiveness of retrieval functionalities of clinical decision support
systems. We present preliminary results and show how relations are able to
provide a sizable increase of the precision for several topics, albeit having
no impact on others. We then discuss some future directions to minimize the
impact of negative results while maximizing the impact of good results.
