Medical Acronym Disambiguation Using Online Sources

Hospitals produce millions of patient records consisting of clinical annotations containing extensive usage of abbreviations. The data in these clinical annotations are an excellent source for bioinformatics research but the use of abbreviations can create ambiguity. The main objective of our research is to develop a software application that takes a medical acronym as input and accesses medical and pharmaceutical websites to retrieve information from articles containing the acronym along with a user selected full-form of the acronym. The retrieved information consists of article title, authors, publication date, article abstract, and Medical Subject Header (MeSH) details. The information is used by researchers in the Biomedical Informatics Division of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center as part of a research effort for reducing the ambiguity created by the use of acronyms. Our contribution to this research effort is a framework for disambiguation that accesses online sources; we design and populate an internal database that can be used in future research efforts.