Clinical Term Recognition: From Local to LOINC Terminology. An Application for Italian Language

This paper presents a methodology to recognize the specific domain terminology used by clinical and biological laboratories. The local linguistic forms have to be mapped with the standard LOINC® (https://loinc.org/) terminology and assigned to a specific identification code. The local linguistic forms recognition can give an important support for experts in finding the correct code and allows them the use of a local terminology not provided in the LOINC standard. The work presented a set of grammars build with the linguistic Nooj tool to recognize the local linguistic forms expressed in the Italian language. It shows how the linguistic elements contained in the clinical test definition can suggest important values of LOINC standard facilitating the coding process (e.g. the adjective “urinary” used in the local test suggests the values “urine” for the parameter “type of sample”).