Hello Ian, Thursday, August 17, 2006, 8:49:01 PM, you wrote:
IC> The concrete thinking problem is "is machine processable, is good". IC> Computer languages in use are max 40 years old. SNOMED is 32 years IC> old. The oldest practically useful computer is how old - <20 years IC> perhaps. English language is rather older than modern western IC> medicine. Strangely, we can still understand English written a couple IC> of hundred years ago. IC> Modern studies on coding demonstrate considerable intercoder IC> variability, even amongst experts. IC> It seems likely to me that computers will conquer natural language IC> processing faster than clinicians en masse can navigate a controlled IC> vocabulary with accuracy and speed. I am very fascinated by grammar and its very powerful in very controlled domains, as in programming languages, but the English language is not controlled and I really doubt this will happen. Parsing simple sentences leads to quite large parse trees and its very hard for the computer to pick the correct one. eg "The man boarded the plane with a suitcase" now who has the suitcase, the man or the plane, we know its the man, but the computer has a lot of trouble with this simple statement. Its solved by probability analysis and frequency analysis, but trying to make sense of notes about a complex problem coded with the average clinicians terse expressions is a big ask. Especially when mistakes are potentially costly. I would think that unless we can "use" computer processable coding there is little point in getting terms out of text anyway, as you are saying there is no use for them. google "semantic web" - its possible everyone else is wrong and we will never have computer processable medical records, but I doubt it. If its going to work then constraining/assisting input using the smarts in the terminology (and using this info usefully )needs to be proven first. If that works then natural language processing is another layer on top, and not a substitute. "Using Snomed-CT" should be invisible to clinicians, and natural language processing is not the only way to this goal. -- Best regards, Andrew mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Andrew McIntyre Buderim Gastroenterology Centre www.buderimgastro.com.au PH: 07 54455055 FAX: 54455047 _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
