Automatic extraction of medication information from medical discharge summaries.
OBJECTIVE
This article describes a system developed for the 2009 i2b2 Medication Extraction Challenge. The purpose of this challenge is to extract medication information from hospital discharge summaries.


METHODS
The system explored several linguistic natural language processing techniques (eg, term-based and token-based rule matching) to identify medication-related information in the narrative text. A number of lexical resources was constructed to profile lexical or morphological features for different categories of medication constituents.


METHODS
Performance was evaluated in terms of the micro-averaged F-measure at the horizontal system level.


RESULTS
The automated system performed well, and achieved an F-micro of 80% for the term-level results and 81% for the token-level results, placing it sixth in exact matches and fourth in inexact matches in the i2b2 competition.


CONCLUSIONS
The overall results show that this relatively simple rule-based approach is capable of tackling multiple entity identification tasks such as medication extraction under situations in which few training documents are annotated for machine learning approaches, and the entity information can be characterized with a set of feature tokens.
Yang
Hui
H
Department of Computing, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. h.yang@open.ac.uk
D057286:Electronic Health Records; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D010351:Patient Discharge; D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations; D012985:Software Design
D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations
J Biomed Inform. 2001 Oct;34(5):301-10
12123149
J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2010 Sep-Oct;17(5):514-8
20819854