Identifying Clinical Terms in Medical Text Using Ontology-Guided Machine Learning

Background: Automatic recognition of medical concepts in unstructured text is an important component of many clinical and research applications, and its accuracy has a large impact on electronic health record analysis. The mining of medical concepts is complicated by the broad use of synonyms and nonstandard terms in medical documents. Objective: We present a machine learning model for concept recognition in large unstructured text, which optimizes the use of ontological structures and can identify previously unobserved synonyms for concepts in the ontology. Methods: We present a neural dictionary model that can be used to predict if a phrase is synonymous to a concept in a reference ontology. Our model, called the Neural Concept Recognizer (NCR), uses a convolutional neural network to encode input phrases and then rank medical concepts based on the similarity in that space.