Evaluation of a semantic data model for chest radiology: Application of a new methodology

An essential step toward the effective processing of the medical language i s the development of representational models that formalize the language se mantics. These models, also known as semantic data models, help to unlock t he meaning of descriptive expressions, making them accessible to computer s ystems. The present study tries to determine the quality of a semantic data model created to encode chest radiology findings. The evaluation methodolo gy relied on the ability of physicians to extract information from textual and encoded representations of chest X-ray reports, whilst answering questi ons associated with each report, The evaluation demonstrated that the encod ed reports seemed to have the same information content of the original text ual reports. The methodology generated useful data regarding the quality of the data model, demonstrating that certain segments were creating ambiguou s representations and that some details were not being represented.