A schema for representing medical language applied to clinical radiology.

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.