Atigeo at TREC 2012 Medical Records Track: ICD-9 Code Description Injection to Enhance Electronic Medical Record Search Accuracy

The TREC 2012 Medical Records Track task involves the identification of electronic medical records (EMRs) that are relevant to a set of search topics. Atigeo has a Computer-Aided Coding (CAC) product that analyzes electronic medical records (EMRs) and recommends ICD-9 codes that represent the diagnoses and procedures described in those medical records. We have developed a suite of natural language processing (NLP) components that are useful for both tasks. Our TREC 2012 experiments focused on the ICD-9 admission and diagnosis codes included in more than 90% of the TREC EMRs: we used our comprehensive ICD-9 database to insert one of three variants of the text descriptions associated with each code found in each EMR. We describe the variations of ICD-9 code descriptions we inserted, the NLP components used for processing all the reports and topics, and report on the results of our experiments.