Design and evaluation of an ontology based information extraction system for radiological reports

This paper describes an information extraction system that extracts and converts the available information in free text Turkish radiology reports into a structured information model using manually created extraction rules and domain ontology. The ontology provides flexibility in the design of extraction rules, and determines the information model for the extracted semantic information. Although our information extraction system mainly concentrates on abdominal radiology reports, the system can be used in another field of medicine by adapting its ontology and extraction rule set. We achieved very high precision and recall results during the evaluation of the developed system with unseen radiology reports. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.