Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Develop a representational schema for clinical concepts and apply it to the task of encoding radiology reports of the chest. DESIGN: The schema was developed following a manual analysis of sample reports from the domain. The schema has two main components: the Medical Entities Dictionary (MED), which specifies the formal representation of the concepts in the domain and of their structures, and the natural-language processor, which specifies the linguistic expressions of the concepts. The schema was evaluated by applying it to a test set of 7,500 reports. Two-hundred reports from the test set were manually analyzed by a medical expert to determine the accuracy and success rate of the system. RESULTS: 82% of the 7,500 reports that contained relevant clinical information were successfully structured automatically. For the smaller set of 200 reports, 80% were structured successfully with an accuracy rate of 97%. CONCLUSIONS: The schema is a formal representation for clinical concepts in radiology reports, and provides domain coverage that is particularly well-suited for natural-language processing of radiology for use in a decision support system.
Full Text
The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (1.8 MB).
Selected References
These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.
- Cimino J. J., Clayton P. D., Hripcsak G., Johnson S. B. Knowledge-based approaches to the maintenance of a large controlled medical terminology. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 1994 Jan-Feb;1(1):35–50. doi: 10.1136/jamia.1994.95236135. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Friedman C., Alderson P. O., Austin J. H., Cimino J. J., Johnson S. B. A general natural-language text processor for clinical radiology. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 1994 Mar-Apr;1(2):161–174. doi: 10.1136/jamia.1994.95236146. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Friedman C., Cimino J. J., Johnson S. B. A conceptual model for clinical radiology reports. Proc Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care. 1993:829–833. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Hripcsak G., Cimino J. J., Johnson S. B., Clayton P. D. The Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center decision-support system as a model for implementing the Arden Syntax. Proc Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care. 1991:248–252. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Masarie F. E., Jr, Miller R. A., Bouhaddou O., Giuse N. B., Warner H. R. An interlingua for electronic interchange of medical information: using frames to map between clinical vocabularies. Comput Biomed Res. 1991 Aug;24(4):379–400. doi: 10.1016/0010-4809(91)90035-u. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Nakao M. A., Axelrod S. Numbers are better than words. Verbal specifications of frequency have no place in medicine. Am J Med. 1983 Jun;74(6):1061–1065. doi: 10.1016/0002-9343(83)90819-7. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]