Mapping Institution-Specific Study Descriptions to RadLex Playbook Entries

The naming of imaging procedures is currently not standardized across institutions. As a result, it is a challenge to establish national registries, for instance, a national registry of dose to facilitate comparisons among different types of CT procedures. RSNA's RadLex Playbook is an effort towards addressing this gap (by introducing a unique Playbook identifier called an RPID for each procedure), and the current research focuses on semi-automatically mapping institution-specific procedure descriptions to Playbook entries to assist with this standardization effort. We discuss an algorithm we have developed to facilitate the mapping process which first extracts RadLex codes from the procedure description and then uses the definition of an RPID to determine the most suitable RPID(s) for the extracted set of RadLex codes. We also developed a tool that has three modes of operations-a single procedure mapping mode that allows a user to map a single institution-specific procedure description to a Playbook entry, a bulk mode to process large number of descriptions, and an exploratory mode that assists a user to better understand how the selection of values for various Playbook attributes affects the resulting RPID. We validate our algorithms using 166 production CT procedure descriptions and discuss how the tool can be used by administrators to map institution-specific procedure descriptions to RPIDs.