Finding Every Medical Terms by Life Science Dictionary for MedNLP

We have been developing an English-Japanese thesaurus of medical terms for 20 years. The thesaurus is compatible with MeSH (Medical Subject Headings developed by National Library of Medicine, USA) and contains approximately 30 thousand headings with 200 thousand synonyms (consisting of the names of anatomical concepts, biological organisms, chemical compounds, methods, disease and symptoms). In this study, we aimed to extract medical terms as many as possible from the test data by a simple longest-matching Perl script. After changing the given UTF-8 text to EUC format, the matching process required only 2 minutes including loading of a 10 MB dictionary into memory space with a desktop computer (Apple Mac Pro). From the 0.1 MB test document, 2,569 terms (including English spellings) were tagged and visualized in a color HTML format. Particularly focusing on the names of disease and symptoms, 893 terms were found with several mistakes and missings. However, this process has a limitation in assigning ambiguous abbreviations and misspelled words. The simple longest-matching strategy may be useful as a preprocessing of medical reports.