title: Attempting to Use MetaMap in Clinical Practice: A Feasibility Study on the Identification of Medical Concepts from Italian Clinical Notes.
abstract: This study assessed the feasibility of using MetaMap to identify medical concepts from clinical notes written in Italian. We performed two experiments: in "EXP 1", we used MetaMap to annotate Italian texts using a knowledge source consisting of Italian UMLS sources only; in "EXP 2", we used MetaMap to analyze an English unsupervised translated version of the original Italian texts. We considered medical concepts related to three semantic categories: "Disorders", "Findings" and "Symptoms". Average recall, precision and F-measure were equal to 0.53, 0.98 and 0.69 in "EXP 1", and to 0.75, 0.95 and 0.83 in "EXP 2". For both "EXP 1" and "EXP 2" MetaMap showed better performances for the "Disorders" than for "Findings" and "Symptoms". In conclusion, when using MetaMap with the English translation of the Italian clinical notes, we obtained performances good enough to allow using MetaMap in clinical practice. Further investigation about the types of MetaMap's failures could be useful to understand how to improve performances even better.
authors: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Istituto di Elettronica e di Ingegneria dell'Informazione e delle Telecomunicazioni (IEIIT), Milan, Italy.
authors: Emma
authors: E
authors: Chiaramello
authors: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Istituto di Elettronica e di Ingegneria dell'Informazione e delle Telecomunicazioni (IEIIT), Milan, Italy.
authors: Alessia
authors: A
authors: Paglialonga
authors: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Istituto di Elettronica e di Ingegneria dell'Informazione e delle Telecomunicazioni (IEIIT), Milan, Italy.
authors: Francesco
authors: F
authors: Pinciroli
authors: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Istituto di Elettronica e di Ingegneria dell'Informazione e delle Telecomunicazioni (IEIIT), Milan, Italy.
authors: Gabriella
authors: G
authors: Tognola
mesh_terms: D004282:Documentation; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D005240:Feasibility Studies; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D007558:Italy; D007802:Language; D012984:Software; D009626:Terminology as Topic