Mapping medical acronyms

Searches in the multimedia House Corpus reveal that, as well as a noun, the acronym MRI functions in the House MD series as an adjective and, albeit rarely, as a transitive verb and that, besides referring to equipment used in the MRI procedure and to the procedure itself, it is also used as a countable noun, often in the plural (MRIs), to refer to the scans so produced. By contrast, the entry in the online OED (Third edition) refers to MRI only as a noun and restricts its definition to a medical procedure and associated equipment. Given these characteristics, the House Corpus project has been an opportunity to investigate medical acronyms more completely and, in particular, to meet the challenge they represent for medical trainees when listening to spoken medical discourse. With the assistance of student annotators, every medical acronym in the House Corpus has now been indexed in terms of grammatical (countable/uncountable noun; adjective and verb) and functional categories (specific diseases; therapeutic/diagnostic procedures; equipment; test results; medical facilities, names of substances; anatomical parts and body states). Special care has been taken in the tagging process to include derivative and related forms (e.g. fMRI as well as MRI). As a result, the House Corpus now has a specific Acronym Search resource, a first step towards Acronym Maps that aggregate the various grammatical and functional categories into which a specific acronym falls. While a clear boon for medical English classrooms, such Maps support hunches about the nature and incidence of acronyms in spoken and written forms of medical discourse in English and, when compared to other languages such as Italian, highlight differences in abbreviatory strategies. The article concludes that greater consideration of specialised medical genres and contexts, especially those relating to spoken discourse, (Loiacono 2015, 2016, 2018) needs to be made in corpus studies than has been the case in the past.