Semi-automated Classification of Medical Phrases, using a Personal Computer

In a basic documentation for the Childrens’ Hospital of the University of Münster medical phrases to be coded are mapped on a subset of items of a thesaurus. The most similar items are then presented to the encoding person to decide which item, if any, is semantically equivalent to the new medical phrase. New phrases lead to an insert of the new item and its code into the thesaurus. The mapping algorithm is based on formal criteria (common substrings), allowing spelling errors and various wordings. It is independent of the thesaurus and may thus be applied to other thesauri and code tables. The generation of needed help files is easy and fast to perform.