Analysis of RadLex Coverage and Term Co-occurrence in Radiology Reporting Templates

Abstract

Radiologists are critically interested in promoting best practices in medical imaging, and to that end, they are actively developing tools that will optimize terminology and reporting practices in radiology. The RadLex® vocabulary, developed by the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), is intended to create a unifying source for the terminology that is used to describe medical imaging. The RSNA Reporting Initiative has developed a library of reporting templates to integrate reusable knowledge, or meaning, into the clinical reporting process. This report presents the initial analysis of the intersection of these two major efforts. From 70 published radiology reporting templates, we extracted the names of 6,489 reporting elements. These terms were reviewed in conjunction with the RadLex vocabulary and classified as an exact match, a partial match, or unmatched. Of 2,509 unique terms, 1,017 terms (41%) matched exactly to RadLex terms, 660 (26%) were partial matches, and 832 reporting terms (33%) were unmatched to RadLex. There is significant overlap between the terms used in the structured reporting templates and RadLex. The unmatched terms were analyzed using the multidimensional scaling (MDS) visualization technique to reveal semantic relationships among them. The co-occurrence analysis with the MDS visualization technique provided a semantic overview of the investigated reporting terms and gave a metric to determine the strength of association among these terms.

Investigation of Terminology Coverage in Radiology Reporting Templates and Free-text Reports

“…The results verify our findings in previous studies, which found an overall rate of 67%reporting elements derived from the RSNA reporting templates were matched to RadLex® terms (Hong et al, 2012), and suggest that the concepts that appear in the reporting templates occur frequently within free-text clinical reports and the reporting templates provide useful coverage of the "domain of discourse" in radiology reports .…”

“…The elements of the reporting templates have been mapped to corresponding terms in standardized biomedical ontologies such as the RadLex® radiology lexicon and the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT®) by employing a semi-automated mapping tool called RadMap (Hong et al, 2012).…”

Building and Querying RDF/OWL Database of Semantically Annotated Nuclear Medicine Images

“…With the RDF, the knowledge pertaining to medical image interpretation can be stored as a set of triples, where each element of the triple can be referenced by an explicit uniform resource identifier (URI) to which resources can be linked. By linking to welldefined medical terminologies, such as RadLex [12][13][14], Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) [15], and SNOMED CT [16,17], an RDF-based approach can explicitly refer to a formalized set of concepts. With query languages that make use of triple-based patterns, such as the Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL), it is possible to create detailed queries for specific information.…”

Content Analysis of Reporting Templates and Free-Text Radiology Reports

“…Each reporting template has associated metadata, including information about the template's title, creator, subject, description, and date. The elements of the reporting templates have been mapped to corresponding terms in standardized biomedical ontologies such as the RadLex® radiology lexicon and the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT®) vocabulary [9].…”

“…Standardized terminologies are used to reduce ambiguity and improve the clarity of radiology reports and image annotations, and provide a uniform means of indexing radiological materials in a variety of settings [9]. In this study, we sought to evaluate how well the RSNA reporting templates covered the "domain of discourse" of actual radiology reports.…”