title: A study of actions in operative notes.
abstract: Operative notes contain rich information about techniques, instruments, and materials used in procedures. To assist development of effective information extraction (IE) techniques for operative notes, we investigated the sublanguage used to describe actions within the operative report 'procedure description' section. Deep parsing results of 362,310 operative notes with an expanded Stanford parser using the SPECIALIST Lexicon resulted in 200 verbs (92% coverage) including 147 action verbs. Nominal action predicates for each action verb were gathered from WordNet, SPECIALIST Lexicon, New Oxford American Dictionary and Stedman's Medical Dictionary. Coverage gaps were seen in existing lexical, domain, and semantic resources (Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus, SPECIALIST Lexicon, WordNet and FrameNet). Our findings demonstrate the need to construct surgical domain-specific semantic resources for IE from operative notes.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Health Informatics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Serguei
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Pakhomov
authors.forename: Nora E
authors.initials: NE
authors.lastname: Burkart
authors.forename: James O
authors.initials: JO
authors.lastname: Ryan
authors.forename: Genevieve B
authors.initials: GB
authors.lastname: Melton
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D008499:Medical Records; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D009870:Operating Room Information Systems; D013514:Surgical Procedures, Operative; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled