The IR Radlex Project: an interventional radiology lexicon--a collaborative project of the Radiological Society of North America and the Society of Interventional Radiology.

AS images, imaging reports, and medical records move online, radiologists need a unified language to organize and retrieve them. Standardized terminology is increasingly vital to the practice of medicine, as this enables the information in reports to be understood unambiguously by people and machines. Many of the benefits of clinical information technology cannot be realized unless information is recorded using standard terms in a structured format. Unfortunately, almost all radiology reports are produced as unstructured text narratives rather than in a structured format, thereby hampering radiologists’ ability to participate in the ongoing changes in our health care system, which are increasingly driven by information technology. Radiologists currently use a variety of terminologies and standards, but no single lexicon serves all of their needs. RadLex is a controlled terminology for radiology—a single unified source of radiology terms that is designed to fill this need. The purpose of RadLex is to provide a uniform structure for capturing, indexing, and retrieving a variety of radiology information sources, such as teaching files and research data. This may facilitate a first step toward structured reporting of radiology reports. This will also permit mining of data for participation in research projects, registries, and quality assurance. The RadLex project is sponsored by the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), which has enlisted the collaboration of other key radiology organizations, including the American College of Radiology (ACR) as well as subspecialty societies, to develop a comprehensive radiology lexicon. It has been designed to satisfy the needs of software developers, system vendors, and radiology users by adopting the best features of existing terminology systems while producing new terms to fill critical gaps. RadLex also provides a comprehensive and technology-friendly replacement for the ACR Index for Radiological Diagnoses (1). Rather than “reinventing the wheel,” RadLex unifies and supplements radiology terms in other lexicons, such as the ACR Index (http://acr.org), SNOMED (http:// snomed.org), the Unified Medical Language System (http://www.nlm.nih. gov/research/umls/), the Fleischner Society Glossaries, and the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine standard (1–6). The terms are freely available on the Internet with cross references to these other lexicons and standards at http://radlex.org.