MENELAS: Coding and Information Retrieval from Natural Language Patient Discharge Summaries
Pierre Zweigenbaum · Studies in health technology and informatics · 1995
The overall goal of Menelas is to provide better access to the information contained in natural language patient discharge summaries, through the design and implementation of a pilot system able to analyse medical texts. This paper summarises the developments performed for this purpose during the project. It stresses the fundamental issue of the normalisation of medical information into a common, language-independent representation. The project has resulted in a collection of components, knowledge bases and systems for processing natural language patient discharge summaries. It has also produced methodological results on the design of a normalised representation of medical information and its construction from textual input. Further developments and applications have already started in the context of two other European Union projects.