Semantic analysis of medical records

A program (LogStory) is described that was developed for the automatic semantic analysis of clinical narratives, stored in a computerized problem-oriented medical record (PROMED). The diagnoses were written in a free-text format during consultation, and later collected into diagnostic classes, e.g., diseases. A lexical parser automatically created dictionaries from the clinical narrative associated with each disease. Automatic (fuzzy) set operations were performed on the words associated with each class. The manifestations of 16 diseases were automatically extracted by pairwise operations on the word sets. The correlation between diseases and corresponding signs, symptoms and treatment was highly significant (p < 0.001). Applying the difference operation on diseases with disjunct sets of clinical findings allowed the recovery of disease-specific knowledge. The evolution of a disease was accounted for, and the system was able to generalize its findings. The PROMED-LogStory concept enables the processing of natural language and may be a powerful tool for knowledge acquisition and clinical research.