A Preliminary Study of Clinical Concept Detection Using Syntactic Relations.

Concept detection is an integral step in natural language processing (NLP) applications in the clinical domain. Clinical concepts are detailed (e.g., "pain in left/right upper/lower arm/leg") and expressed in diverse phrase types (e.g., noun, verb, adjective, or prepositional phrase). There are rich terminological resources in the clinical domain that include many concept synonyms. Even with these resources, concept detection remains challenging due to discontinuous and/or permuted phrase occurrences. To overcome this challenge, we investigated an approach to exploiting syntactic information. Syntactic patterns of concept phrases were mined from continuous, non-permuted forms of synonyms, and these patterns were used to detect discontinuous and/or permuted concept phrases. Experiments on 790 de-identified clinical notes showed that the proposed approach can potentially boost a recall of concept detection. Meanwhile, challenges and limitations were noticed. In this paper, we report and discuss our preliminary analysis and finding.