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JAMIA 1994;1:142-160 doi:10.1136/jamia.1994.95236145
  • Original Investigation
  • Research Paper

Natural Language Processing and the Representation of Clinical Data

  1. Naomi Sager,
  2. Margaret Lyman,
  3. Christine Bucknall,
  4. Ngo Nhan,
  5. Leo J Tick
  1. Affiliation of the authors: New York University, New York, NY
  1. Correspondence and Reprints: Naomi Sager, PhD, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, 251 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012.

    Abstract

    Objective Develop a representation of clinical observations and actions and a method of processing free-text patient documents to facilitate applications such as quality assurance.

    Design The Linguistic String Project (LSP) system of New York University utilizes syntactic analysis, augmented by a sublanguage grammar and an information structure that are specific to the clinical narrative, to map free-text documents into a database for querying.

    Measurements Information precision (I-P) and information recall (I-R) were measured for queries for the presence of 13 asthma-health-care quality assurance criteria in a database generated from 59 discharge letters.

    Results I-P, using counts of major errors only, was 95.7% for the 28-letter training set and 98.6% for the 31-letter test set. I-R, using counts of major omissions only, was 93.9% for the training set and 92.5% for the test set.

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