Automatic annotation of medical reports using SNOMED-CT: a flexible approach based on medical knowledge databases

This paper presents a rule-based method for the detection and normalization of medical entities using SNOMED-CT which, although based on knowledge stored in terminological resources, allows some flexibility in order to account for the language variation typical of medical texts. Our system is based on the software Unitex and is one of the few to code French medical texts with SNOMED-CT concept identifiers. Our evaluation quantifies the benefits of such a flexible approach, but also emphasizes terminological resource shortcomings for the processing of medical reports written in French. Finally, our methodology is an interesting alternative to supervised training, as the extraction rules require limited development.