Systems and methods for quantifying qualitative medical expressions

摘要

The systems and methods of the invention can process a qualitative expression, typically a phrase, to generate a numerical value that represents the likelihood of an event as expressed by the given qualitative expression. The qualitative expressions typically are made up of a probability term and possibly a term of degree and one or more terms of negation. Thus, the systems described herein allow numerical information to be captured from qualitative expressions. This, allows further numeric processing and data refining, and facilitates the development of databases of information, such as databases of information about the significance of the existence of a symptom for the diagnosis of a particular disease.