SemOntoMap: A Hybrid Approach for Semantic Annotation of Clinical Texts

This study addresses the challenge of leveraging free-text descriptions in Electronic Health Records (EHR) for clinical research and healthcare improvement. Despite the potential of this data, its direct interpretation by computers is limited. Semantic annotation emerges as a method to make EHR free text machine-interpretable but struggles with specific domain ontologies and faces heightened difficulties in psychiatry. To tackle these challenges, this study proposes a system based on unsupervised learning techniques to extract entities and their relationships, aligning them with a domain ontology. The effectiveness of this system has been validated within PsyCARE project by analyzing 60 patient discharge summaries.