Generating models of surgical procedures using UMLS concepts and multiple sequence alignment.

Surgical procedures can be viewed as a process composed of a sequence of steps performed on, by, or with the patient's anatomy. This sequence is typically the pattern followed by surgeons when generating surgical report narratives for documenting surgical procedures. This paper describes a methodology for semi-automatically deriving a model of conducted surgeries, utilizing a sequence of derived Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concepts for representing surgical procedures. A multiple sequence alignment was computed from a collection of such sequences and was used for generating the model. These models have the potential of being useful in a variety of informatics applications such as information retrieval and automatic document generation.