Automatic Categorization of Medical Documents

Resumen

The main objective of this thesis is to propose a categorizing model for medical documents,
called HiMeD Model. The HiMeD Model is based on the principle that we denominated
hierarchical correlation of specialized terms, in which a medical concept, to be used in an
automatic categorization process, can always be represented by terms, where these terms
are linked up in a hierarchical path. This hierarchical linking can contain components that
allow the determination of these categories ordered by the degree of relevance of the
adopted concept. The use of this principle allows us to isolate the categorization tasks from
the unnecessary influence of terms not belonging to the medical vocabulary of reference
and of the straight calculation of the term-weight in the information retrieval process used
by the classic models. The concepts developed here were used in several experiments that
demonstrated the quality of the proposed model. These experiments are another important
contribution of this work. Finally, a tool for automatic coding of medical documents was
implemented based on the components of our model, thus demonstrating its technological
capacity in building automatic categorization tools. This tool, called MedCode, was used in
experiments carried out with the help of medical coding specialists, and its use improved
the precision of the automatic coding of medical documents. This improvement is largely
due to the interactive and visual characteristics of the prototype, which allowed the
specialists to modify the coding environment, to select the type of processing algorithm,
and to modify other document processing options.