A linguistic approach is presented to develop a representation of patient data. Semantic
categories developed for computer processing of narrative clinical reports are shown
to be similar to the Medical Concepts used manually to extract data from narrative
in Exercises of the Computer-based Patient Record Institute. Clinical statement types
composed of these categories are used in the Linguistic String Project (LSP) medical
language processing (MLP) system to convert narrative information into relational
database tables of patient information. A procedure for mapping the output of the
LSP MLP system into SNOMED International codes was developed. Preliminary results
and further requirements are discussed.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing - Automatic Encoding - SNOMED - Clinical Data Representation