A system of annotation for conceptual semantic units of thought was developed with a domain expert in order to examine reasoning patterns and narrative structure. These thought units have shown a common narrative structure (seen in the above image, which shows the number of each type of thought unit along the temporal progression of all narratives). 

Further examination of this narrative structure could reveal points where physicians deviate from a reasoning path that would lead them to the correct diagnosis; could indicate differences in reasoning between more and less experienced physicians, for example.

McCoy W*., Ovesdotter Alm C., Calvelli C., Li R., Pelz J., Shi P., Haake A. Annotation schemes to encode domain knowledge in medical narratives (pp. 95-103). Proceedings of the 6th Linguistic Annotation Workshop at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Assoc. for Computational Linguistics 2012, Jeju, Korea. 

Womack K*., Ovesdotter Alm C., Calvelli C., Pelz J., Shi P., Haake A. Using linguistic analysis to characterize conceptual units of thought in spoken medical narratives (pp. 3722-3726) Proceedings of Interspeech 2013, Lyon, France. 

Guo X., Yu Q., Alm C., Calvelli C., Pelz J., Shi P., Haake A. From Spoken Narratives to Domain Knowledge: Mining Linguistic Data for Medical Image Understanding. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Elsevier 2014.