Automated Misspelling Detection and Correction in Persian Clinical Text

Accurate electronic health records are important for clinical care, research, and patient safety assurance. Correction of misspelled words is required to ensure the correct interpretation of medical records. In the Persian language, the lack of automated misspelling detection and correction system is evident in the medicine and health care. In this article, we describe the development of an automated misspelling detection and correction system for radiology and ultrasound’s free texts in the Persian language. To achieve our goal, we used n-gram language model and three different types of free texts related to abdominal and pelvic ultrasound, head and neck ultrasound, and breast ultrasound reports. Our system achieved the detection performance of up to 90.29% for radiology and ultrasound’s free texts with the correction accuracy of 88.56%. Results indicated that high-quality spelling correction is possible in clinical reports. The system also achieved significant savings during the documentation process and final approval of the reports in the imaging department.