Professional Language in Swedish Radiology Reports – Characterization for Patient-Adapted Text Simplification

In health care, there is a need for patient adaption of clinical text, so that patients can understand their own health records. As a base for construction of automated text simplification tools, characterization of the clinical language is needed. We describe a corpus of 0.43 mill. radiology reports from a University Hospital, characterize it quantitatively and per-form a qualitative content analysis. The results show that a limited set of words and phrases are recurrent in the reports and can be used for exchange to more easy-to-read vocabu-lary. Semantic categories such as body parts, findings, proce-dures, and administrative information can be used in the sim-plification process. This study investigates the potentials and the pitfalls for text simplification of medical Swedish into general Swedish for laymen