A pathology database system for autopsy diagnoses using free-text method

Using natural language a computerized indexing and retrieval system was developed on a commercial database program, DATATRIEVE (Digital Equipment Corporation, Japan). Summarized anatomical diagnoses of nearly 4000 autopsy cases have been registered over a 13-year period at Tokyo Metropolitan Geriatric Hospital. There were 187,367 words in the pathological diagnoses with 4689 distinct words excluding articles, prepositions and conjunctions. 'Atrophy', 'congestion' and 'metastasis' were the most frequent words with frequencies of 4335, 3377, and 3373, respectively. Distinct clinical diagnoses were 2497, among which 'pneumonia', 'hypertension' and 'DIC' predominated. Each step of retrieval by character strings from the sequential data file requires less than a minute.