Ontology-Based Categorisation of Medical Texts for Health Professionals

Abstract

The appropriate categorisation of written information by health professionals is very important to guarantee its accessibility. Unfortunately, the information technology tools that support professionals on that task imply a heavy workload, so that the responsibility for categorising the written content is often delegated to administrative staff. Well-known health ontologies such as SNOMED-CT or MeSH provide a representation of the clinical contents to be used by the information systems. This research proposes a computer based method to automatically extract and code the diagnostics, procedures and treatments according to health ontologies. A Knowledge Management System based on an extended version of Drupal is used to implement and evaluate this proposal. Results provide a positive evidence on the application of the method to support medical professionals.

Keywords

• Medical ontologies
• Text categorisation
• MeSH
• SNOMED-CT