Building SNOMED CT Post-Coordinated Expressions from Annotation Groups

SNOMED CT supports post-coordination, a technique to combine clinical concepts to ontologically define more complex concepts. This technique follows the validity restrictions defined in the SNOMED CT Concept Model. Pre-coordinated expressions are compositional expressions already in SNOMED CT, whereas post-coordinated expressions extend its content. In this project we aim to evaluate the suitability of existing pre-coordinated expressions to provide the patterns for composing typical clinical information based on a defined list of sets of interrelated SNOMED CT concepts. The method produces a 9.3% precision and a 95.9% recall. As a consequence, further investigations are needed to develop heuristics for the selection of the most meaningful matched patterns to improve the precision.