Experience On A Surgical Pathology Database And A Lexicon Compiled From Locally Derived Medical English

POLARS-PAIRS was constructed for an anatomic pathology department of a university hospital. The system produced surgical pathology reports for the patient´s chart and status log to monitor the progress of specimens. The educational function is served by a disease index file retrievable by natural language for a pathology library linking with X-ray, patient´s charts, etc. The database consists of fixed and variable length narrative data. The contents include path accession number, hospital unit number, demographic information, narrative text of the operative procedures, clinical abstract, and pathological diagnosis. Narrative data supply words to a dynamic LEXICON containing 25,000 medical and ordinary words (including misspellings) used locally. Each word of the LEXICON was coded to initiate several routes of action which determines the utilization of the respective word for retrievals. Natural language retrieval by diagnosis are accomplished off-line through a keyword rotation microfiche catalog and on-line via database access system. The database comprises 25,000 reports on 8000 patients.