Towards Converting Clinical Phrases into SNOMED CT Expressions

Converting information contained in natural language clinical text into computer-amenable structured representations can automate many clinical applications. As a step towards that goal, we present a method which could help in converting novel clinical phrases into new expressions in SNOMED CT, a standard clinical terminology. Since expressions in SNOMED CT are written in terms of their relations with other SNOMED CT concepts, we formulate the important task of identifying relations between clinical phrases and SNOMED CT concepts. We present a machine learning approach for this task and using the dataset of existing SNOMED CT relations we show that it performs well.