Title: Classification of diagnoses that are described in natural language

Authors: Berry (L.M.) de Bruijn, Arie Hasman, Jan Willem Arends

Addresses: Department of Medical Informatics, University of Limburg in Maastricht, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. ' Department of Medical Informatics, University of Limburg in Maastricht, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. ' Department of Pathology, Academic Hospital, P.O. Box 5800, 6202 AZ Maastricht, The Netherlands

Abstract: A method is presented to classify pathology reports that were composed in natural language. This way, the pathologist need not formulate a formal classification, but can adopt automatically suggested classifications. This paper describes the underlying theoretical aspects of the nearest neighbour method that was used, gives considerations for practical use, and presents the results of two studies on the method.

Keywords: diagnosis coding; text analysis; nearest neighbour classification; natural language processing; pattern recognition; pathology reports.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHTM.1999.004532

International Journal of Healthcare Technology and Management, 1999 Vol.1 No.3/4, pp.343 - 356

Published online: 21 May 2004 *

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