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A General Natural-language Text Processor for Clinical Radiology

A General Natural-language Text Processor for Clinical Radiology Abstract Objective: Development of a general natural-language processor that identifies clinical information in narrative reports and maps that information into a structured representation containing clinical terms. Design: The natural-language processor provides three phases of processing, all of which are driven by different knowledge sources. The first phase performs the parsing. It identifies the structure of the text through use of a grammar that defines semantic patterns and a target form. The second phase, regularization, standardizes the terms in the initial target structure via a compositional mapping of multi-word phrases. The third phase, encoding, maps the terms to a controlled vocabulary. Radiology is the test domain for the processor and the target structure is a formal model for representing clinical information in that domain. Measurements: The impression sections of 230 radiology reports were encoded by the processor. Results of an automated query of the resultant database for the occurrences of four diseases were compared with the analysis of a panel of three physicians to determine recall and precision. Results: Without training specific to the four diseases, recall and precision of the system(combined effect of the processor and query generator) were 70% and 87%. Training of the query component increased recall to 85% without changing precision. This content is only available as a PDF. Author notes Supported in part by Grant Number R29 LM05397 form the National Library of Medicine and Grant Number 6-61483 from the Research Foundation of CUNY. American Medical Informatics Association http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association Oxford University Press

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References (9)

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
American Medical Informatics Association
ISSN
1067-5027
eISSN
1527-974X
DOI
10.1136/jamia.1994.95236146
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Abstract Objective: Development of a general natural-language processor that identifies clinical information in narrative reports and maps that information into a structured representation containing clinical terms. Design: The natural-language processor provides three phases of processing, all of which are driven by different knowledge sources. The first phase performs the parsing. It identifies the structure of the text through use of a grammar that defines semantic patterns and a target form. The second phase, regularization, standardizes the terms in the initial target structure via a compositional mapping of multi-word phrases. The third phase, encoding, maps the terms to a controlled vocabulary. Radiology is the test domain for the processor and the target structure is a formal model for representing clinical information in that domain. Measurements: The impression sections of 230 radiology reports were encoded by the processor. Results of an automated query of the resultant database for the occurrences of four diseases were compared with the analysis of a panel of three physicians to determine recall and precision. Results: Without training specific to the four diseases, recall and precision of the system(combined effect of the processor and query generator) were 70% and 87%. Training of the query component increased recall to 85% without changing precision. This content is only available as a PDF. Author notes Supported in part by Grant Number R29 LM05397 form the National Library of Medicine and Grant Number 6-61483 from the Research Foundation of CUNY. American Medical Informatics Association

Journal

Journal of the American Medical Informatics AssociationOxford University Press

Published: Mar 1, 1994

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