title: Evaluation of a French medical multi-terminology indexer for the manual annotation of natural language medical reports of healthcare-associated infections.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: CISMeF, LITIS EA 4108 Institute of Biomedical Research, University of Rouen, Rouen University Hospital, Normandy, France.
authors.forename: Saoussen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sakji
authors.forename: Quentin
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Gicquel
authors.forename: Suzanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Pereira
authors.forename: Ivan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Kergourlay
authors.forename: Denys
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Proux
authors.forename: Stéfan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Darmoni
authors.forename: Marie-Hélène
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Metzger
mesh_terms: 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