[A new database system for radiological reports].

We have designed and developed a new database system to facilitate automatic feedback of the content of radiology reports to radiologists. The prototype of this database system has been implemented in the RGSS-IDJ, a developmental computer system that applies artificial intelligence methods to a reporting system. This prototype system was constructed to test the feasibility of overcoming the limitations of conventional database systems. The new database system is based on our semantic model for radiology reports and is able to treat data with unnormalized relations. Operations specific to our database system include the ability to acquire information about a set of reports that contains any semantic expression included in the lexicon and the ability to obtain the expressions that belong to a set of several semantic expressions in the reports. Thus, our new database system will offer a more powerful tool for analyzing the content of reports than conventional database systems.