Using n-gram method in the decomposition of compound medical diagnoses

Compound diagnoses are often assigned to just one disease code. This is a known cause of coding error. Our paper outlines an efficient, cheap and easy to implement method for semi-atutomatic decomposition of such diagnostic expressions. The proposed method is based on n-grams. To verify the method two human encoders were asked to analyse the same set of 92 clinical diagnoses. Their results were compared to the analysis produced by the method. The results demonstrate the reasonability of the approach.