Abstract:
A program (LogStory) is described that was developed for the automatic semantic analysis
of clinical narratives, stored in a computerized problem-oriented medical record (PROMED).
The diagnoses were written in a free-text format during consultation, and later collected
into diagnostic classes, e.g., diseases. A lexical parser automatically created dictionaries
from the clinical narrative associated with each disease. Automatic (fuzzy) set operations
were performed on the words associated with each class. The manifestations of 16 diseases
were automatically extracted by pairwise operations on the word sets. The correlation
between diseases and corresponding signs, symptoms and treatment was highly significant
(p <0.001). Applying the difference operation on diseases with disjunct sets of clinical
findings allowed the recovery of disease-specific knowledge. The evolution of a disease
was accounted for, and the system was able to generalize its findings. The PROMED-LogStory
concept enables the processing of natural language and may be a powerful tool for
knowledge acquisition and clinical research.
Key-Words
Medical Record - Expert System - Fuzzy Set Theory - Knowledge Acquisition - General
Practice - Natural Language Processing
