title: Automatic concept extraction from spoken medical reports.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The objective of this project is to investigate methods whereby a combination of speech recognition and automated indexing methods substitute for current transcription and indexing practices.
  
  
  METHODS
  We based our study on existing speech recognition software programs and on NOMINDEX, a tool that extracts MeSH concepts from medical text in natural language and that is mainly based on a French medical lexicon and on the UMLS. For each document, the process consists of three steps: (1) dictation and digital audio recording, (2) speech recognition, (3) automatic indexing. The evaluation consisted of a comparison between the set of concepts extracted by NOMINDEX after the speech recognition phase and the set of keywords manually extracted from the initial document. The method was evaluated on a set of 28 patient discharge summaries extracted from the MENELAS corpus in French, corresponding to in-patients admitted for coronarography.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The overall precision was 73% and the overall recall was 90%. Indexing errors were mainly due to word sense ambiguity and abbreviations. A specific issue was the fact that the standard French translation of MeSH terms lacks diacritics. A preliminary evaluation of speech recognition tools showed that the rate of accurate recognition was higher than 98%. Only 3% of the indexing errors were generated by inadequate speech recognition.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We discuss several areas to focus on to improve this prototype. However, the very low rate of indexing errors due to speech recognition errors highlights the potential benefits of combining speech recognition techniques and automatic indexing.
authors.affiliation: Intermède, La Basse Revachais, 35580 Guignen, France. happe@intermede.net
authors.forename: André
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Happe
authors.forename: Bruno
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Pouliquen
authors.forename: Anita
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Burgun
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cuggia
authors.forename: Pierre
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Le Beux
mesh_terms: D000043:Abstracting and Indexing; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D004282:Documentation; D006801:Humans; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized / Q000592:standards*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012984:Software; D013060:Speech; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D014831:Voice