Computer auditing of surgical operative reports written in English

We developed a script-based scheme for automated auditing of natural language surgical operative reports. Suitable operations (appendectomy and breast biopsy) were selected, then audit criteria and operation scripts conforming with our audit criteria were developed. Our LISP parser was context and expectation sensitive. Parsed sentences were represented by semigraph structures and placed in a textual database to improve efficiency. Sentence ambiguities were resolved by matching the narrative textual database to the script textual database and employing the Uniform Medical Language System (UMLS) Knowledge Sources. All audit criteria questions were successfully answered for typical operative reports by matching parsed audit questions to the textual database.