Design of an automatic coding algorithm for a multi-axial classification in pathology.

An algorithm for automatic coding of pathology reports using a multi-axial codification (ADICAP) is described and evaluated. It extracts << significant words >> or expressions from a corpus and records the statistical relationships between them and the modalities of the different axes. Different weighting functions are evaluated. With the best settings, in more than two cases out of three the correct modality was found among the top 5 list of candidates, except for the << organ >> axis. Several ways of improvement are discussed especially regarding the poor results on the << organ >> axis. Perspectives of a two stages assembling algorithm completing this first step are proposed.