OBJECTIVE: To construct a Portuguese language index of information on the practice of diagnostic radiology in order to improve the standardization of the medical language and terminology. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A total of 61,461 definitive reports were collected from the database of the Radiology Information System at Hospital das Clínicas - Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto (RIS/HCFMRP) as follows: 30,000 chest x-ray reports; 27,000 mammography reports; and 4,461 thyroid ultrasonography reports. The text mining technique was applied for the selection of terms, and the ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 standard was utilized to construct the index based on a thesaurus structure. The system was created in ^*html. RESULTS: The text mining resulted in a set of 358,236 (n = 100%) words. Out of this total, 76,347 (n = 21%) terms were selected to form the index. Such terms refer to anatomical pathology description, imaging techniques, equipment, type of study and some other composite terms. The index system was developed with 78,538 *html web pages. CONCLUSION: The utilization of text mining on a radiological reports database has allowed the construction of a lexical system in Portuguese language consistent with the clinical practice in Radiology.

Keywords: Radiology reports; RadLex; Medical education; Information technology; Health informatics.