This paper presents a novel information retrieval system designed specifically for medical case finding applications. The proposed system begins by extracting medical information from free-text narrative reports and storing it in a predefined relational clinical data mart. The extraction is performed using a medical thesaurus and a regular expression pattern match. Following the extraction phase, inclusion/exclusion criteria are provided to the system using a physician-friendly user interface. The system converts the entered criteria into a single SQL command which can be then executed on the relational data mart. In order to achieve the appropriate response time required for on-line analysis, the system implements several caching mechanisms. The proposed system has been examined on real-world database. The performance of the system has been compared to the results obtained manually by a physician. The comparison indicates that the proposed system can be used for non-critical case-finding applications such as: finding appropriate patients for clinical trials.

Information Retrieval System for Medical Narrative Reports

During a method for selecting a potential participant for a medical study on the basis of a selection criterion, patient data assigned to a patient are electronically stored, a secondary criterion is assigned to the selection criterion, the patient data are electronically evaluated on the basis of the secondary criterion, and based on this electronic evaluation, a measure for fulfilling the selection criterion is determined for the patient associated with the patient data. The patient is selected as a potential participant on the basis of this measure.

Method for selecting a potential participant for a medical study on the basis of a selection criterion

/pdf/applying-natural-language-processing-to-clinical-information-18zco22zid.pdf

Applying Natural Language Processing to Clinical Information Retrieval

Bei einem Verfahren zur Auswahl eines moglichen Teilnehmers fur ein medizinisches Vorhaben anhand eines Auswahlkriteriums werden einem Patienten zugeordnete Patientendaten elektronisch gespeichert, dem Auswahlkriterium wird ein Sekundarkriterium zugeordnet, die Patientendaten werden anhand des Sekundarkriteriums elektronisch ausgewertet und hieraus fur den, den Patientendaten zugeordneten Patienten ein Mass fur die Erfullung des Auswahlkriteriums ermittelt. Abhangig vom Mass wird der Patient als moglicher Teilnehmer ausgewahlt.

Verfahren zur auswahl eines möglichen teilnehmers für ein medizinisches vorhaben anhand eines auswahlkriteriums

Information Studies

The N.Y.U. Linguistic String Project (LSP) is presently engaged in applying its programs for natural language processing to medical records. The programs transform the free narrative input into a structured data base suitable for automatic information processing, such as question answering, editing of records, or statistical summaries of the data. In order to determine the appropriate structures for a given type of material we first perform a manual linguistic analysis on a sample of the texts prior to processing. From this we obtain a set of word classes and a tabular form (called an information format) for this type of material. We then apply the series of processing programs to the sentences of the texts. Each sentence is parsed with the Linguistic String Parser English grammar in order to obtain its grammatical structure; then certain standard English transformations are applied to regularize the grammatical form of the sentence. Finally a set of "formatting transformations" map the words of the sentence into the slots of the information format, or table, for this material in such a way that the sentence is reconstructible up to paraphrase from its representation in the table.

Cynthia Insolio

Papers

Transforming medical records into a structured data base