Content Analysis of Reporting Templates and Free-Text Radiology Reports

The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) has developed a set of templates for structured reporting of radiology results. To measure how much of the content of conventional narrative (“free-text”) reports is covered by the concepts included in the RSNA reporting templates, we selected five reporting templates that represented a variety of imaging modalities and organ systems. From a sample of 8,275 consecutive, de-identified radiology reports from an academic medical center, we identified one corresponding imaging procedure code for each reporting template. The reports were annotated with RadLex and SNOMED CT terms using the BioPortal Annotator web service. The reporting templates we examined accounted for 17 to 49 % of the concepts that actually appeared in a sample of corresponding radiology reports. The findings suggest that the concepts that appear in the reporting templates occur frequently within free-text clinical reports; thus, the templates provide useful coverage of the “domain of discourse” in radiology reports. The techniques used in this study may be helpful to guide the development of reporting templates by identifying concepts that occur frequently in radiology reports, to evaluate the coverage of existing templates, and to establish global benchmarks for reporting templates.