Clinical Vocabulary and Clinical Finding Concepts in Medical Literature

Takashi Okumura, Eiji Aramaki, Yuka Tateisi

Abstract: Clinical decision support systems necessitate a disease knowledge base, which comprises a set of clinical findings for each disease. To efficiently represent the findings, this paper explores the relationship between clinical vocabulary and findings in medical literature through quantitative and qualitative analysis of representative disease databases. Although the data volume and the analyzed features are limited, the observations suggested the following. First, there are sets of clinical findings that are essential for physicians, but the majority of findings in medical literature are not the essential ones. Second, deviation of term frequency for clinical findings vocabulary is minimal, and clinical findings require appropriate grammar for efficient representation of findings. Third, appropriate mapping of clinical findings with clinical vocabulary would allow the efficient expression of clinical findings.