An experimental study in automatically categorizing medical documents

In this article, we evaluate the retrieval performance of an algorithm that automatically categorizes medical documents. The categorization, which consists in assigning an International Code of Disease (ICD) to the medical document under examination, is based on well-known information retrieval techniques. The algorithm, which we proposed, operates in a fully automatic mode and requires no supervision or training data. Using a database of 20,569 documents, we verify that the algorithm attains levels of average precision in the 70–80% range for category coding and in the 60–70% range for subcategory coding. We also carefully analyze the case of those documents whose categorization is not in accordance with the one provided by the human specialists. The vast majority of them represent cases that can only be fully categorized with the assistance of a human subject (because, for instance, they require specific knowledge of a given pathology). For a slim fraction of all documents (0.77% for category coding and 1.4% for subcategory coding), the algorithm makes assignments that are clearly incorrect. However, this fraction corresponds to only one-fourth of the mistakes made by the human specialists.