From episodes of care to diagnosis codes: automatic text categorization for medico-economic encoding.

We report on the design and evaluation of an original system to help assignment ICD (International Classification of Disease) codes to clinical narratives. The task is defined as a multi-class multi-document classification task. We combine a set of machine learning and data-poor methods to generate a single automatic text categorizer, which returns a ranked list of ICD codes. The combined ranking system currently obtains a precision of 75% at high ranks and a recall of about 63% for the top twenty returned codes for a theoretical upper bound of about 79% (inter-coder agreement). The performance of the data-poor classifier is weak, whereas the use of tempo-rally-typed contents such as anamnesis and prescription free text sections results in a statistically significant improvement.