Evaluation of Doc’EDS: a French semantic search tool to query health documents from a clinical data warehouse

Background Unstructured data from electronic health records represent a wealth of information. Doc’EDS is a pre-screening tool based on textual and semantic analysis. The Doc’EDS system provides a graphic user interface to search documents in French. The aim of this study was to present the Doc’EDS tool and to provide a formal evaluation of its semantic features. Methods Doc’EDS is a search tool built on top of the clinical data warehouse developed at Rouen University Hospital. This tool is a multilevel search engine combining structured and unstructured data. It also provides basic analytical features and semantic utilities. A formal evaluation was conducted to measure the impact of Natural Language Processing algorithms. Results Approximately 18.1 million narrative documents are stored in Doc’EDS. The formal evaluation was conducted in 5000 clinical concepts that were manually collected. The F-measures of negative concepts and hypothetical concepts were respectively 0.89 and 0.57. Conclusion In this formal evaluation, we have shown that Doc’EDS is able to deal with language subtleties to enhance an advanced full text search in French health documents. The Doc’EDS tool is currently used on a daily basis to help researchers to identify patient cohorts thanks to unstructured data.