An Approach for Automatic Classification of Radiology Reports in Spanish

Automatic detection of relevant terms in medical reports is useful for educational purposes and for clinical research. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques can be applied in order to identify them. In this work we present an approach to classify radiology reports written in Spanish into two sets: the ones that indicate pathological findings and the ones that do not. In addition, the entities corresponding to pathological findings are identified in the reports. We use RadLex, a lexicon of English radiology terms, and NLP techniques to identify the occurrence of pathological findings. Reports are classified using a simple algorithm based on the presence of pathological findings, negation and hedge terms. The implemented algorithms were tested with a test set of 248 reports annotated by an expert, obtaining a best result of 0.72 F1 measure. The output of the classification task can be used to look for specific occurrences of pathological findings.