Automatic RadLex coding of Chinese structured radiology reports based on text similarity ensemble

BackgroundStandardized coding of plays an important role in radiology reports’ secondary use such as data analytics, data-driven decision support, and personalized medicine. RadLex, a standard radiological lexicon, can reduce subjective variability and improve clarity in radiology reports. RadLex coding of radiology reports is widely used in many countries, but translation and localization of RadLex in China are far from being established. Although automatic RadLex coding is a common way for non-standard radiology reports, the high-accuracy cross-language RadLex coding is hardly achieved due to the limitation of up-to-date auto-translation and text similarity algorithms and still requires further research.MethodsWe present an effective approach that combines a hybrid translation and a Multilayer Perceptron weighting text similarity ensemble algorithm for automatic RadLex coding of Chinese structured radiology reports. Firstly, a hybrid way to integrate Google neural machine translation and dictionary translation helps to optimize the translation of Chinese radiology phrases to English. The dictionary is made up of 21,863 Chinese–English radiological term pairs extracted from several free medical dictionaries. Secondly, four typical text similarity algorithms are introduced, which are Levenshtein distance, Jaccard similarity coefficient, Word2vec Continuous bag-of-words model, and WordNet Wup similarity algorithms. Lastly, the Multilayer Perceptron model has been used to synthesize the contextual, lexical, character and syntactical information of four text similarity algorithms to promote precision, in which four similarity scores of two terms are taken as input and the output presents whether the two terms are synonyms.ResultsThe results show the effectiveness of the approach with an F1-score of 90.15%, a precision of 91.78% and a recall of 88.59%. The hybrid translation algorithm has no negative effect on the final coding, F1-score has increased by 21.44% and 8.12% compared with the GNMT algorithm and dictionary translation. Compared with the single similarity, the result of the MLP weighting similarity algorithm is satisfactory that has a 4.48% increase compared with the best single similarity algorithm, WordNet Wup.ConclusionsThe paper proposed an innovative automatic cross-language RadLex coding approach to solve the standardization of Chinese structured radiology reports, that can be taken as a reference to automatic cross-language coding.