Automatic Mapping Clinical Notes to Medical Terminologies

Automatic mapping of key concepts from clinical notes to a terminology is an important task to achieve for extraction of the clinical information locked in clinical notes and patient reports. The present paper describes a system that automatically maps free text into a medical reference terminology. The algorithm utilises Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to enhance a lexical token matcher. In addition, this algorithm is able to identify negative concepts as well as performing term qualification. The algorithm has been implemented as a web based service running at a hospital to process real-time data and demonstrated that it worked within acceptable time limits and accuracy limits for them. However broader acceptability of the algorithm will require comprehensive evaluations.