Transcription of Case Report Forms from Unstructured Referral Letters: A Semantic Text Analytics Approach

In this paper we present a framework for the semi-automatic extraction of medical entities from referral letters and use them to transcribe a case report form. Our framework offers the functionality to: (a) extract the medical entity from the unstructured referral letters, (b) classify them according to their semantic type, and (c) transcribe a case report form based on the extracted information from the referral letter. We take a semantic text analytics approach where SNOMED-CT ontology is used to both classify referral concepts and to establish semantic similarities between referral concepts and CRF elements. We used 100 spine injury referral letters, and a standard case report form used by Association of Dalhousie Neurosurgeons, Dalhousie University.