Identification of patient name references within medical documents using semantic selectional restrictions.
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Date
2002-12-04
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Abstract
De identification of a patient s personal data from medical records is a protective legal requirement imposed before medical documents can be used for research purposes or transferred to other healthcare providers e g teachers students tele consultations This de identification process is tedious if performed manually and is known to be quite faulty in direct search and replace strategies 9 In this paper we report on the identification step of this process The proposed algorithm is based on estimating the fitness of candidate patient name references to a set of semantic selectional restrictions The semantic restrictions place tight contextual requirements upon candidate words in the report text and are determined automatically from a manually tagged corpus of training reports Maximum entropy classifiers are used to provide a probabilistic measure of the belief of a given candidate token to a given semantic restriction We report on the design and preliminary evaluation of the system within the do main of pediatric urology