Using POSTDOC to recognize biomedical concepts in medical school curricular documents

Abstract

Recognition of the biomedical concepts in a document is prerequisite to further processing of the document: medical educators examine curricular documents to discover the coverage of certain topics, detect unwanted redundancies, integrate new content, and delete old content; and clinicians are concerned with terms in patient medical records for purposes ranging from creation of an electronic medical record to identification of medical literature relevant to a particular case. POSTDOC (POSTprocessor of DOCuments) is a computer application that (1) accepts as input a free-text, ASCII-formatted document and uses the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus to recognize relevant main concept terms; (2) provides term co-occurrence data and thus is able to identify potentially increasing correlations among concepts within the document; and (3) retrieves references from MEDLINE files based on user identification of relevant subjects. This paper describes a formative evaluation of POSTDOC's ability to recognize UMLS Metathesaurus biomedical concepts in medical school lecture outlines. The "precision" and "recall" varied over a wide range and were deemed not yet acceptable for automated creation of a database of concepts from curricular documents. However, results were good enough to warrant further study and continued system development.