Contextualization in automatic extraction of drugs from hospital patient records

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2011:169:527-31.

Abstract

Information Extraction (IE) from medical texts aims at the automatic recognition of entities and relations of interests. IE is based on shallow analysis and considers only sentences containing important words. Thus IE of drugs from discharge letters can identify as 'current' some past or future medication events. This article presents heuristic observations enabling to filter drugs that are taken by the patients during the hospitalization. These heuristics are based on the default PR structure and linguistic expressions signaling temporal and conditional markers. They are integrated in a system for drug extraction from hospital Patient Records (PRs) in Bulgarian language. Present evaluation results are summarized as well.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Clinical Pharmacy Information Systems
  • Data Mining / methods*
  • Drug-Related Side Effects and Adverse Reactions / prevention & control
  • Electronic Data Processing
  • Hospital Administration
  • Humans
  • Medical Informatics / methods*
  • Medical Records Systems, Computerized / organization & administration*
  • Medication Errors / prevention & control
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Software