Indexing anatomical phrases in neuro-radiology reports to the UMLS 2005AA.

This work describes a methodology to index anatomical phrases to the 2005AA release of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). A phrase chunking tool based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) was developed to identify semantically coherent phrases within medical reports. Using this phrase chunker, a set of 2,551 unique anatomical phrases was extracted from brain radiology reports. These phrases were mapped to the 2005AA release of the UMLS using a vector space model. Precision for the task of indexing unique phrases was 0.87.