An empirical investigation into the conceptual structure of chest radiograph findings.

A method of investigating the conceptual structure of findings is presented, in which: 1) finding statements are extracted manually from free text, 2) the main concepts in each finding are manually identified and classified, and 3) the resulting sets of classes are examined for insights into finding structure. This study applies the method to chest radiograph reports. Although the subjects of the findings studied fall into seven classes, the same conceptual structure can be used for most of them.