Lab Indicator Standardization in a Regional Medical Health Platform

Due to the lack of a complete synonym list for indicator mapping, different hospitals may use different names for the same lab indicator. Lab indicator name discrepancy has greatly affected the medical information sharing and exchange among hospitals. It is becoming increasingly important to standardize the lab indicators. Such a problem can be seen as an entity alignment task to map different indicators into standard ones. However, a lab indicator only involves its name and value, not including any extra properties or contexts which is needed by existing knowledge base (KB) alignment or entity linking methods. More importantly, there exist no available standard KBs to provide standard indicator terms. Therefore, we cannot implement these existing methods directly. To solve the problem, in this paper, we present the first effort to work on lab indicator standardization. We propose a novel standardization method, which firstly clusters the indicators based on their names and abbreviations, and then iteratively employs a binary classification algorithm based on similarity features and partition score features for indicator mapping. Experimental results on the real-world medical data show that the final classification achieves a F1-score of 85.27%, which indicates that our method improves the quality and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.