AUTHOR=Divita Guy , Coale Kathleen , Maldonado Jonathan Camacho , Silva Rafael Jiménez , Rasch Elizabeth TITLE=Extracting body function information using rule-based methods: Highlighting structure and formatting challenges in clinical text JOURNAL=Frontiers in Digital Health VOLUME=4 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/digital-health/articles/10.3389/fdgth.2022.914171 DOI=10.3389/fdgth.2022.914171 ISSN=2673-253X ABSTRACT=

This paper describes the identification of body function (BF) mentions within the clinical text within a large, national, heterogeneous corpus to highlight structural challenges presented by the clinical text. BF in clinical documents provides information on dysfunction or impairments in the function or structure of organ systems or organs. BF mentions are embedded in highly formatted structures where the formats include implied scoping boundaries that confound existing natural language processing segmentation and document decomposition techniques. This paper describes follow-up work to adapt a rule-based system created using National Institutes of Health records to a larger, more challenging corpus of Social Security Administration data. Results of these systems provide a baseline for future work to improve document decomposition techniques.