AUTOMATED CODING OF PATIENT DISCHARGE SUMMARIES USING CONCEPTUAL GRAPHS

In medicine, as in other domains, indexing and classification is a nat ural human task which is used for information retrieval and representa tion. In the medical field, encoding of patient discharge summaries is still a manual time-consuming task. This paper describes an automated coding system of patient discharge summaries from the field of corona ry diseases into the ICD-9-CM classification. The system is developed in the context of the European AIM MENELAS project, a natural-language understanding system which uses the conceptual-graph formalism. Index ing is performed by using a two-step processing scheme; a first recogn ition stage is implemented by a matching procedure and a secondary sel ection stage is made according to the coding priorities. We show the g eneral features of the necessary translation of the classification ter ms in the conceptual-graph model, and for the coding rules compliance. An advantage of the system is to provide an objective evaluation and assessment procedure for natural-language understanding.