An Integrated Approach to Biomedical Term Identification Systems

Abstract

In this paper a novel architecture to build biomedical term identification systems is presented. The architecture combines several sources of information and knowledge bases to provide practical and exploration-enabled biomedical term identification systems. We have implemented a system to evidence the convenience of the different modules considered in the architecture. Our system includes medical term identification, retrieval of specialized literature and semantic concept browsing from medical ontologies. By applying several Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, we have developed a prototype that offers an easy interface for helping to understand biomedical specialized terminology present in Spanish medical texts. The result is a system that performs term identification of medical concepts over any textual document written in Spanish. It is possible to perform a sub-concept selection using the previously identified terms to accomplish a fine-tune retrieval process over resources like SciELO, Google Scholar and MedLine. Moreover, the system generates a conceptual graph which semantically relates all the terms found in the text. In order to evaluate our proposal on medical term identification, we present the results obtained by our system using the MANTRA corpus and compare its performance with the Freeling-Med tool.

Keywords

• automatic entity recognition
• biomedical ontologies
• biomedical terminology
• information retrieval
• semantic conceptual graph
• natural language processing (nlp)