Evaluation of a French medical multi-terminology indexer for the manual annotation of natural language medical reports of healthcare-associated infections.
BACKGROUND
Surveillance of healthcare-associated infections is essential to prevention. A new collaborative project, namely ALADIN, was launched in January 2009 and aims to develop an automated detection tool based on natural language processing of medical documents.


OBJECTIVE
The objective of this study was to evaluate the annotation of natural language medical reports of healthcare-associated infections.


METHODS
A software MS Access application (NosIndex) has been developed to interface ECMT XML answer and manual annotation work. ECMT performances were evaluated by an infection control practitioner (ICP). Precision was evaluated for the 2 modules and recall only for the default module. Exclusion rate was defined as ratio between medical terms not found by ECMT and total number of terms evaluated.


RESULTS
The medical discharge summaries were randomly selected in 4 medical wards. From the 247 medical terms evaluated, ECMT proposed 428 and 3,721 codes, respectively for the default and expansion modules. The precision was higher with the default module (P1=0.62) than with the expansion (P2=0.47).


CONCLUSIONS
Performances of ECMT as support tool for the medical annotation were satisfactory.
Sakji
Saoussen
S
CISMeF, LITIS EA 4108 Institute of Biomedical Research, University of Rouen, Rouen University Hospital, Normandy, France.
Gicquel
Quentin
Q
Pereira
Suzanne
S
Kergourlay
Ivan
I
Proux
Denys
D
Darmoni
Stéfan
S
Metzger
Marie-Hélène
MH
D000043:Abstracting and Indexing / Q000379:methods*; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003428:Cross Infection / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000517:prevention & control; D004282:Documentation / Q000379:methods*; D005602:France / Q000453:epidemiology; D006801:Humans; D008403:Mass Screening / Q000379:methods; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D012984:Software; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled