In French hospitals, medical diagnosis coding with the ICD10 is commonly performed and the use of effective tools would help coders in their task. AIM OF THIS WORK: To ameliorate an existing coding help system. This system, which already consists of the ICD10 analytical index, would be increased with the terms of the alphabetical index that includes lexical variants and additional terms as well. The addition of the second volume of the ICD would allow the coding of more terms and would lessen documentary silence.
Methods: The first step of this work was a careful study of a theoretical model of the ICD content. Then the alphabetical index file was submitted to a lexical analysis, and it was automatically transformed to be integrated into the existing coding help system.
Results: Compromise had to be made between a theoretical model and between what could be obtained in practice by an automatic processing of the file. Finally the alphabetical index was added to the initial thesaurus, which represents 42,000 terms and 4,000 additional words. Links between words and codes were also considerably increased, which has enhanced the searching possibilities of the tool and lessen documentary silence. Conversely the research time has been increased.
Conclusion: Difficulties have to be encountered when trying to turn a manual tool into an automatic research tool.