J-Medic: A Japanese disease name dictionary based on real clinical usage

Medical texts such as electronic health records are necessary for medical AI development. Nevertheless, it is difficult to use data directly because medical texts are written mostly in natural language, requiring natural language processing (NLP) for medical texts. To boost the fundamental accuracy of Medical NLP, a high coverage dictionary is required, especially one that fills the gap separating standard medical names and real clinical words. This study developed a Japanese disease name dictionary called “J-MeDic” to fill this gap. The names that comprise the dictionary were collected from approximately 45,000 manually annotated real clinical case reports. We allocated the standard disease code (ICD-10) to them with manual, semi-automatic, or automatic methods, in accordance with its frequency. The J-MeDic covers 7,683 concepts (in ICD-10) and 51,784 written forms. Among the names covered by J-MeDic, 55.3% (6,391/11,562) were covered by SDNs; 44.7% (5,171/11,562) were covered by names added from the CR corpus. Among them, 8.4% (436/5,171) were basically coded by humans), and 91.6% (4,735/5,171) were basically coded automatically. We investigated the coverage of this resource using discharge summaries from a hospital; 66.2% of the names are matched with the entries, revealing the practical feasibility of our dictionary.