An automated injury coding system

The authors describe a prototype expert system for assigning codes to injuries detected in medical records such as hospital discharge summaries and coroner's reports. The system is intended to assist investigators in the task of analyzing official data related to injuries sustained by the occupants of automobiles involved in highway accidents. The design draws on previous work by the authors in the areas of knowledge-based information retrieval and pragmatically oriented natural-language processing. The prototype system is implemented on a high-performance workstation and can correctly identify and code a range of injury types.<
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