Retrieval of Similar Electronic Health Records Using UMLS Concept Graphs

摘要

Physicians often use information from previous clinical cases in their decision-making process. However, the large amount of patient records available in hospitals makes an exhaustive search unfeasible. We propose a method for the retrieval of similar clinical cases, based on mapping the text onto UMLS concepts and representing the patient records as semantic graphs. The method also deals with the problems of negation detection and concept identification in clinical free text. To evaluate the approach, an evaluation collection has been developed. The results show that our method correlates well with the expert judgments and outperforms remarkably the traditional term-vector space model.