The OKPU System in NTCIR11 MedNLP2: An IR Approach to ICD-10 Code Identification

This paper describes an IR (Information Retrieval) approach to identifying the ICD-10 code of a medical term, such as a disease name or a description of a symptom or a complaint), in a medical text. In this approach, we prepare a dictionary of disease names, each paired with a corresponding ICD-10 code(s). The system searches for the disease name most relevant to the input, and returns the ICD-10 code paired with the disease name in the dictionary. In IR terms, disease name in the dictionary can be regarded as a document and an input medical term as a query. In order to handle an input which does not exactly match with any disease names in the database, we introduce two kinds of partial matching and a context search, where a query includes context words of the input term. Preliminary evaluation for the MedNLP2 test set shows that with this simple approach our system correctly identified 54% of the input medical terms.