ACORN — An Automated Coder of Report Narrative

Abstract

An Automated Coder of Report Narrative (ACORN) is being developed by the Biostatistics Department at Roswell Park Memorial Institute for Cancer Research in Buffalo, New York. ACORN seeks to standardize and automatically structure the information contained in dictated narrative summaries in case histories — in this instance post-operative surgical reports. The approach is based on the string analysis of Zellig Harris. It takes advantage of the syntactical structure of the English language to extract the information and organize it in a form which is readily utilizable by techniques which are related to (but which are much more versatile than) current punch-card procedures. The over-all system of ACORN is complex and only about half of the entire system has been developed to the point where the programs can be tested on actual operative reports. The results to date are sufficiently interesting to warrant a preliminary progress report.