The framing of surgical procedure terms

This paper provides a description of the potentials of frames used as conceptual-terminological representations of surgical procedure terms. We analyzed a parallel corpus (Dutch-English-French-German) of 150 terminological descriptions of medical diagnoses and procedures (so-called rubrics) taken from the procedure volume of the ICD-9-CM classification. In this classification each surgical procedure is rendered by means of a description of the code’s meaning in natural language as well as a numerical computer-readable code. Medical coders read medical documentation (e.g. patient charts), then assign the proper code, using their coding knowledge in addition to checking classification manuals, to the completed service or procedure. Once they've determined the proper coding, medical coders key the code into the proper form on their computer system. Medical coding is an important activity and plays an essential role in the health information industry, e.g. for billing private and public insurance companies. In practice, however, coding results show to be incorrect. One of the main reasons is that rubrics are produced from and for medical professionals: they exclusively consist of terms and they are linguistically realized as elliptical nominal strings and phrases. It goes without saying that their correct interpretation presupposes consolidated domain knowledge which professional coders generally do not dispose of. Incorrectly interpreted rubrics inevitably result in wrong code assignments, and has serious consequences for the statistical evaluation of codes. We therefore developed a terminological frame-based representation model which exposes the conceptual structure of the terms in a rubric in a structured and unambiguous way. We illustrate by means of corpus samples how the computer implementation of the proposed model supports in an efficient way the correct reading, translation and generation of classification rubrics in different languages.

ISBN:978-2-9811149-1-4

Jaar van publicatie:2009