Collecting specialty-related medical terms: Development and evaluation of a resource for Spanish.

Journal: BMC medical informatics and decision making
Published Date:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Controlled vocabularies are fundamental resources for information extraction from clinical texts using natural language processing (NLP). Standard language resources available in the healthcare domain such as the UMLS metathesaurus or SNOMED CT are widely used for this purpose, but with limitations such as lexical ambiguity of clinical terms. However, most of them are unambiguous within text limited to a given clinical specialty. This is one rationale besides others to classify clinical text by the clinical specialty to which they belong.

Authors

  • Pilar López-Úbeda
    Universidad de Jaén, Jaén, Andalucía, Spain.
  • Alexandra Pomares-Quimbaya
    Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia.
  • Manuel Carlos Díaz-Galiano
    SINAI Group - CEATIC - Universidad de Jaén, Campus Las Lagunillas s/n, Jaén E-23071, Spain. Electronic address: mcdiaz@ujaen.es.
  • Stefan Schulz
    Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Documentation, Medical University of Graz, Austria.