Building medical ontologies by terminology extraction from texts: An experiment for the intensive care units

In many medical fields, maintenance, comparison and aggregation of unambiguous terminologies go through formal specialized clinical terminologies: ontologies.We describe a methodology to build medical ontology from textual reports using a natural language processing tool, the SYNTEX software. The methodology is illustrated in the surgical intensive care medical domain.We have tested the possibility for an expert to build a sizeable ontology in a reasonable time. The quality of the ontology has been evaluated according to its capacity to cover the ICD-10 terminology in the field.Finally, the methodology itself is discussed.