Patent US 5,809,476

The present invention relates to a system for coding data. An example implementation is disclosed whereby the coding system is a computer program especially suited to analysing text input to the computer by for example a keyboard, optical character recognition or voice recognition. The data to be coded may, for example, comprise information relating to an event, item or operation. In the preferred form of the invention, the input data is text describing a medical diagnosis and operation which would be dictated or recorded by a surgeon subsequent to an operation being performed on a patient. The coding system of the present invention analyses each word or term of the medical information in conjunction with specialised and generalised dictionaries of words and terms, along with the relationships between individual words or terms. In this way, in addition to producing a compressed symbolic representation of the original information which may later be interrogated or used for statistical analysis, the present invention is also capable of correcting or supplementing the original information.