Centre for Computational Linguistics: Projects

MENELAS

Time Span: 1992 - 1994
Commission of the European Communities (AIM)
J.L. Willems, P. Spyns, L. Dehaspe & G. Adriaens

Medical patient reports consist mainly of free text, combined with results of various laboratories. While numerical data can easily be stored and processed for archiving and research purposes, free text is rather difficult to be processed by a computer, although it contains the most relevant information, such as the patient discharge summaries.

More and more the need arises to exploit the informational resources hidden in the free text parts of a medical report and to process that information. The availability of those data could lead to the creation of a medical knowledge base for purposes of basic research. A more obvious application deals with queries concerning one (or a series of) patient(s). Coding on a semi-automated base (using the International Classification of Diseases, 9th edition) as well as automatic classification of patient diagnoses are a hot topic (at least in Belgium), and may one day function as part of a Hospital Management Information System.

In order to achieve the above mentioned goals, a prototype has already been implemented. After a syntactic analysis of the sentences in a Patient Discharge Summary, the prototype generates the ICD-9-CM codes for the medical-technical vocabulary found in the sentences. The grammar formalism used is Restriction Grammar.

The MENELAS-project has a broader scope than this prototype. It comprises a morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis of the medical sublanguage. The project also focuses on Knowledge Representation (by means of Conceptual Graphs), storage facilities (relational databases) and an expert-system (generation of ICD-9-CM-codes). The application domain includes a subset of 2 medical disciplines (cardiology and cardiac surgery) and will be described on a model-theoretical basis.

There is also the official MENELAS home page (for the whole project, not just the Leuven part) at
DIAM, Service d'Informatique Médicale,
Assistance Publique
Hôpitaux de Paris / Département de Biomathématiques,
Université Paris 6

CCL

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