Medical Document Classification Based on MeSH

One of the most challenging projects in information systems is extracting information from unstructured texts, including medical document classification. I am developing a classification algorithm that classifies a medical document by analyzing its content and categorizing it under predefined topics from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). I collected a corpus of 50 full-text journal articles (N=50) from MEDLINE, which were already indexed by experts based on MeSH. Using natural language processing (NLP), my algorithm classifies the collected articles under MeSH subject headings. I evaluated the algorithm's outcome by measuring its precision and recall of resulting subject headings from the algorithm, comparing results to the actual documents' subject headings. The algorithm classified the articles correctly under 45% to 60% of the actual subject headings and got 40% to 53% of the total subject headings correct. This holds promising solutions for the global health arena to index and classify medical documents expeditiously.