Automatic semantic interpretation of anatomic spatial relationships in clinical text.

A set of semantic interpretation rules to link the syntax and semantics of locative relationships among anatomic entities was developed and implemented in a natural language processing system. Two experiments assessed the ability of the system to identify and characterize physico-spatial relationships in coronary angiography reports. Branching relationships were by far the most common observed (75%), followed by PATH (20%) and PART/WHOLE relationships. Recall and precision scores were 0.78 and 0.67 overall, suggesting the viability of this approach in semantic processing of clinical text.