Automated indexing and retrieval of medical documentation: Application to the ADM database

ADM-INDEX is a system for indexing and retrieval of Patients Dicharge Summaries (PDSs) by using linguistic methods (morphologic, syntaxic and semantic processing). The ADM-INDEX knowledge base is a restructuring of a diagnostic aid knowledge base (ADM) in order to allow the linguistic analysis of medical texts. The ADM system is a comprehensive medical knowledge base which has been developped since 1972 at the University Hospital of Rennes and which has been the first professional videotex medical diagnostic aid in France. ADM-INDEX, after linguistic analysis, build the index table with thesaurus wording, medical words, concepts and phrases, unknown words contained in each PDS. The benefit of using those different elements is to improve retrieval. Although our system is constructed with the ADM dictionnay, it can be easily applied to other medical nomenclature or thesaurus. In this paper,we present on the one hand the ADM-INDEX knowledge base which is constituted by rules, a dictionnary and a thesaurus, and on the other hand, the process of indexing and retrieval information. A prototype of the system is available on World Wide Web, which is now the most used multimedia information system on the Internet.