Targeting stopwords for quality assurance of SNOMED-CT.

OBJECTIVE

We assess the potential of exploiting stopwords in biomedical concept names to complete the logical definitions of concepts that are not sufficiently defined.

METHODS

Concepts containing stopwords are selected from the Disorder hierarchy of Systematized NOmenclature of MEDicine (SNOMED-CT). SNOMED-CT consists of two types of concepts: Fully Defined (FD) concepts which are sufficiently defined and Partially Defined (PD) concepts which are not sufficiently defined. In this work, FD concepts containing stopwords are treated as a source of ground truth to complete the definitions of, lexically and semantically similar, PD concepts. FD and PD concepts are lexically and semantically analysed to create sample-sets. Mandatory attribute-relationships are calculated by using an intersection-set logic for each FD sample-set. PD sample-sets are audited against this mandatory attribute-relationship template to identify inconsistencies in modelling styles and potentially missing attribute-relationships.

RESULTS

Lexical and semantic patterns around 11 stopwords were analysed. 26 sample-sets were extracted for the 11 stopwords. Mandatory attribute-relationships were identified for 24 of the 26 sample-sets. The method identified 62.5% - 72.22% of the PD concepts, containing the stopwords in and due to, to be inconsistent in their modelling style and potentially missing at least one attribute-relationship according to the created template.