scholarly journals Extraction of Geriatric Syndromes From Electronic Health Record Clinical Notes: Assessment of Statistical Natural Language Processing Methods (Preprint)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tao Chen ◽  
Mark Dredze ◽  
Jonathan P Weiner ◽  
Leilani Hernandez ◽  
Joe Kimura ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Geriatric Syndrome ◽  
Free Text ◽  
Geriatric Syndromes ◽  
Health Maintenance ◽  
Clinical Notes ◽  
Statistical Natural Language Processing ◽  
Electronic Health

BACKGROUND Geriatric syndromes in older adults are associated with adverse outcomes. However, despite being reported in clinical notes, these syndromes are often poorly captured by diagnostic codes in the structured fields of electronic health records (EHRs) or administrative records. OBJECTIVE We aim to automatically determine if a patient has any geriatric syndromes by mining the free text of associated EHR clinical notes. We assessed which statistical natural language processing (NLP) techniques are most effective. METHODS We applied conditional random fields (CRFs), a widely used machine learning algorithm, to identify each of 10 geriatric syndrome constructs in a clinical note. We assessed three sets of features and attributes for CRF operations: a base set, enhanced token, and contextual features. We trained the CRF on 3901 manually annotated notes from 85 patients, tuned the CRF on a validation set of 50 patients, and evaluated it on 50 held-out test patients. These notes were from a group of US Medicare patients over 65 years of age enrolled in a Medicare Advantage Health Maintenance Organization and cared for by a large group practice in Massachusetts. RESULTS A final feature set was formed through comprehensive feature ablation experiments. The final CRF model performed well at patient-level determination (macroaverage F1=0.834, microaverage F1=0.851); however, performance varied by construct. For example, at phrase-partial evaluation, the CRF model worked well on constructs such as absence of fecal control (F1=0.857) and vision impairment (F1=0.798) but poorly on malnutrition (F1=0.155), weight loss (F1=0.394), and severe urinary control issues (F1=0.532). Errors were primarily due to previously unobserved words (ie, out-of-vocabulary) and a lack of context. CONCLUSIONS This study shows that statistical NLP can be used to identify geriatric syndromes from EHR-extracted clinical notes. This creates new opportunities to identify patients with geriatric syndromes and study their health outcomes.

Development of algorithm for classification smoking status from unstructured bilingual electronic health records based on natural language processing (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ye Seul Bae ◽  
Kyung Hwan Kim ◽  
Han Kyul Kim ◽  
Sae Won Choi ◽  
Taehoon Ko ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Electronic Health Records ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Smoking Status ◽  
Svm Classifier ◽  
Keyword Extraction ◽  
Health Records ◽  
Clinical Notes ◽  
Electronic Health

BACKGROUND Smoking is a major risk factor and important variable for clinical research, but there are few studies regarding automatic obtainment of smoking classification from unstructured bilingual electronic health records (EHR). OBJECTIVE We aim to develop an algorithm to classify smoking status based on unstructured EHRs using natural language processing (NLP). METHODS With acronym replacement and Python package Soynlp, we normalize 4,711 bilingual clinical notes. Each EHR notes was classified into 4 categories: current smokers, past smokers, never smokers, and unknown. Subsequently, SPPMI (Shifted Positive Point Mutual Information) is used to vectorize words in the notes. By calculating cosine similarity between these word vectors, keywords denoting the same smoking status are identified. RESULTS Compared to other keyword extraction methods (word co-occurrence-, PMI-, and NPMI-based methods), our proposed approach improves keyword extraction precision by as much as 20.0%. These extracted keywords are used in classifying 4 smoking statuses from our bilingual clinical notes. Given an identical SVM classifier, the extracted keywords improve the F1 score by as much as 1.8% compared to those of the unigram and bigram Bag of Words. CONCLUSIONS Our study shows the potential of SPPMI in classifying smoking status from bilingual, unstructured EHRs. Our current findings show how smoking information can be easily acquired and used for clinical practice and research.

scholarly journals Semantic computational analysis of anticoagulation use in atrial fibrillation from real world data

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Bean ◽  
James Teo ◽  
Honghan Wu ◽  
Ricardo Oliveira ◽  
Raj Patel ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Atrial Fibrillation ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Electronic Health Record ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Risk Scores ◽  
Free Text ◽  
Health Record ◽  
Electronic Health

AbstractAtrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common arrhythmia and significantly increases stroke risk. This risk is effectively managed by oral anticoagulation. Recent studies using national registry data indicate increased use of anticoagulation resulting from changes in guidelines and the availability of newer drugs.The aim of this study is to develop and validate an open source risk scoring pipeline for free-text electronic health record data using natural language processing.AF patients discharged from 1st January 2011 to 1st October 2017 were identified from discharge summaries (N=10,030, 64.6% male, average age 75.3 ± 12.3 years). A natural language processing pipeline was developed to identify risk factors in clinical text and calculate risk for ischaemic stroke (CHA2DS2-VASc) and bleeding (HAS-BLED). Scores were validated vs two independent experts for 40 patients.Automatic risk scores were in strong agreement with the two independent experts for CHA2DS2-VASc (average kappa 0.78 vs experts, compared to 0.85 between experts). Agreement was lower for HAS-BLED (average kappa 0.54 vs experts, compared to 0.74 between experts).In high-risk patients (CHA2DS2-VASc ≥2) OAC use has increased significantly over the last 7 years, driven by the availability of DOACs and the transitioning of patients from AP medication alone to OAC. Factors independently associated with OAC use included components of the CHA2DS2-VASc and HAS-BLED scores as well as discharging specialty and frailty. OAC use was highest in patients discharged under cardiology (69%).Electronic health record text can be used for automatic calculation of clinical risk scores at scale. Open source tools are available today for this task but require further validation. Analysis of routinely-collected EHR data can replicate findings from large-scale curated registries.

Abstract P259: Using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to Identify Incident Stroke From Electronic Health Records

Circulation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 141 (Suppl_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yiqing Zhao ◽  
Sunyang Fu ◽  
Suzette J Bielinski ◽  
Paul Decker ◽  
Alanna M Chamberlain ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Atrial Fibrillation ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Random Forest ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Stroke Incidence ◽  
Clinical Notes ◽  
Feature Sets ◽  
Electronic Health

Background: The focus of most existing phenotyping algorithms based on electronic health record (EHR) data has been to accurately identify cases and non-cases of specific diseases. However, a more challenging task is to accurately identify disease incidence, as identifying the first occurrence of disease is more important for efficient and valid clinical and epidemiological research. Moreover, stroke is a challenging phenotype due to diagnosis difficulty and common miscoding. This task generally requires utilization of multiple types of EHR data (e.g., diagnoses and procedure codes, unstructured clinical notes) and a more robust algorithm integrating both natural language processing and machine learning. In this study, we developed and validated an EHR-based classifier to accurately identify stroke incidence among a cohort of atrial fibrillation (AF) patients Methods: We developed a stroke phenotyping algorithm using International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9) codes, Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes, and expert-provided keywords as model features. Structured data was extracted from Rochester Epidemiology Project (REP) database. Natural Language Processing (NLP) was used to extract and validate keyword occurrence in clinical notes. A window of ±30 days was considered when including/excluding keywords/codes into the input vector. Frequencies of keywords/codes were used as input feature sets for model training. Multiple competing models were trained using various combinations of feature sets and two machine learning algorithms: logistic regression and random forest. Training data were provided by two nurse abstractors and included validated stroke incidences from a previously established atrial fibrillation cohort. Precision, recall, and F-score of the algorithm were calculated to assess and compare model performances. Results: Among 4,914 patients with atrial fibrillation, 1,773 patients were screened. 3,141 patients had no stroke-related codes or keywords and were presumed to be free of stroke during follow-up. Among the screened patients, 740 had validated strokes and 1,033 did not have a stroke based on review of the EHR by trained nurse abstractors. The best performing stroke incidence phenotyping classifier utilized Keywords+ICD-9+CPT features using a random forest classifier, achieving a precision of 0.942, recall of 0.943, and F-score of 0.943. Conclusion: In conclusion, we developed and validated a stroke algorithm that performed well for identifying stroke incidence in an enriched population (AF cohort), which extends beyond the typical binary case/non-case stroke identification problem. Future work will involve testing the generalizability of this algorithm in a general population.

Natural Language Processing to Identify Cancer Treatments With Electronic Medical Records

2021 ◽  
pp. 379-393
Author(s):  
Jiaming Zeng ◽  
Imon Banerjee ◽  
A. Solomon Henry ◽  
Douglas J. Wood ◽  
Ross D. Shachter ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Electronic Medical Records ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Medical Records ◽  
Structured Data ◽  
Free Text ◽  
Esophagus Cancer ◽  
Clinical Notes ◽  
Patients With Cancer

PURPOSE Knowing the treatments administered to patients with cancer is important for treatment planning and correlating treatment patterns with outcomes for personalized medicine study. However, existing methods to identify treatments are often lacking. We develop a natural language processing approach with structured electronic medical records and unstructured clinical notes to identify the initial treatment administered to patients with cancer. METHODS We used a total number of 4,412 patients with 483,782 clinical notes from the Stanford Cancer Institute Research Database containing patients with nonmetastatic prostate, oropharynx, and esophagus cancer. We trained treatment identification models for each cancer type separately and compared performance of using only structured, only unstructured ( bag-of-words, doc2vec, fasttext), and combinations of both ( structured + bow, structured + doc2vec, structured + fasttext). We optimized the identification model among five machine learning methods (logistic regression, multilayer perceptrons, random forest, support vector machines, and stochastic gradient boosting). The treatment information recorded in the cancer registry is the gold standard and compares our methods to an identification baseline with billing codes. RESULTS For prostate cancer, we achieved an f1-score of 0.99 (95% CI, 0.97 to 1.00) for radiation and 1.00 (95% CI, 0.99 to 1.00) for surgery using structured + doc2vec. For oropharynx cancer, we achieved an f1-score of 0.78 (95% CI, 0.58 to 0.93) for chemoradiation and 0.83 (95% CI, 0.69 to 0.95) for surgery using doc2vec. For esophagus cancer, we achieved an f1-score of 1.0 (95% CI, 1.0 to 1.0) for both chemoradiation and surgery using all combinations of structured and unstructured data. We found that employing the free-text clinical notes outperforms using the billing codes or only structured data for all three cancer types. CONCLUSION Our results show that treatment identification using free-text clinical notes greatly improves upon the performance using billing codes and simple structured data. The approach can be used for treatment cohort identification and adapted for longitudinal cancer treatment identification.

scholarly journals Natural language processing of symptoms documented in free-text narratives of electronic health records: a systematic review

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 364-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theresa A Koleck ◽  
Caitlin Dreisbach ◽  
Philip E Bourne ◽  
Suzanne Bakken
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Electronic Health Records ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Healthcare Providers ◽  
Patient Characteristics ◽  
Disease Classification ◽  
Free Text ◽  
Health Records ◽  
Electronic Health

Abstract Objective Natural language processing (NLP) of symptoms from electronic health records (EHRs) could contribute to the advancement of symptom science. We aim to synthesize the literature on the use of NLP to process or analyze symptom information documented in EHR free-text narratives. Materials and Methods Our search of 1964 records from PubMed and EMBASE was narrowed to 27 eligible articles. Data related to the purpose, free-text corpus, patients, symptoms, NLP methodology, evaluation metrics, and quality indicators were extracted for each study. Results Symptom-related information was presented as a primary outcome in 14 studies. EHR narratives represented various inpatient and outpatient clinical specialties, with general, cardiology, and mental health occurring most frequently. Studies encompassed a wide variety of symptoms, including shortness of breath, pain, nausea, dizziness, disturbed sleep, constipation, and depressed mood. NLP approaches included previously developed NLP tools, classification methods, and manually curated rule-based processing. Only one-third (n = 9) of studies reported patient demographic characteristics. Discussion NLP is used to extract information from EHR free-text narratives written by a variety of healthcare providers on an expansive range of symptoms across diverse clinical specialties. The current focus of this field is on the development of methods to extract symptom information and the use of symptom information for disease classification tasks rather than the examination of symptoms themselves. Conclusion Future NLP studies should concentrate on the investigation of symptoms and symptom documentation in EHR free-text narratives. Efforts should be undertaken to examine patient characteristics and make symptom-related NLP algorithms or pipelines and vocabularies openly available.

scholarly journals Cohort profile: St. Michael's Hospital Tuberculosis Database (SMH-TB), a retrospective cohort of electronic health record data and variables extracted using natural language processing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Landsman ◽  
Ahmed Abdelbasit ◽  
Christine Wang ◽  
Michael Guerzhoy ◽  
Ujash Joshi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Clinical Epidemiology ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Structured Data ◽  
Free Text ◽  
Electronic Health Record Data ◽  
Latent Tb ◽  
Electronic Health

Background Tuberculosis (TB) is a major cause of death worldwide. TB research draws heavily on clinical cohorts which can be generated using electronic health records (EHR), but granular information extracted from unstructured EHR data is limited. The St. Michael's Hospital TB database (SMH-TB) was established to address gaps in EHR-derived TB clinical cohorts and provide researchers and clinicians with detailed, granular data related to TB management and treatment. Methods We collected and validated multiple layers of EHR data from the TB outpatient clinic at St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada to generate the SMH-TB database. SMH-TB contains structured data directly from the EHR, and variables generated using natural language processing (NLP) by extracting relevant information from free-text within clinic, radiology, and other notes. NLP performance was assessed using recall, precision and F1 score averaged across variable labels. We present characteristics of the cohort population using binomial proportions and 95% confidence intervals (CI), with and without adjusting for NLP misclassification errors. Results SMH-TB currently contains retrospective patient data spanning 2011 to 2018, for a total of 3298 patients (N=3237 with at least 1 associated dictation). Performance of TB diagnosis and medication NLP rulesets surpasses 93% in recall, precision and F1 metrics, indicating good generalizability. We estimated 20% (95% CI: 18.4-21.2%) were diagnosed with active TB and 46% (95% CI: 43.8-47.2%) were diagnosed with latent TB. After adjusting for potential misclassification, the proportion of patients diagnosed with active and latent TB was 18% (95% CI: 16.8-19.7%) and 40% (95% CI: 37.8-41.6%) respectively Conclusion SMH-TB is a unique database that includes a breadth of structured data derived from structured and unstructured EHR data. The data are available for a variety of research applications, such as clinical epidemiology, quality improvement and mathematical modelling studies.

scholarly journals Identify Patients with Congestive Heart Failure through Analyzing Free-Text Clinical Notes

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Margot Yann ◽  
Therese Stukel ◽  
Liisa Jaakkimainen ◽  
Karen Tu
Keyword(s):  
Heart Failure ◽  
Primary Care ◽  
Congestive Heart Failure ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Substantial Reduction ◽  
Free Text ◽  
Test Dataset ◽  
Clinical Notes

IntroductionA number of challenges exist in analyzing unstructured free text data in electronic medical records (EMRs). EMR text are difficult to represent and model due to their high dimensionality, heterogeneity, sparsity, incompleteness, random errors and the presence of noise. Objectives and ApproachStandard Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools make errors when applied to clinical notes due to physician use of unconventional language, involving polysemy, abbreviations, ambiguity, misspelling, variations, and negation. This paper presents a novel NLP framework, “Clinical Learning On Natural Expression” (CLONE), to automatically learn from a large primary care EMR database, analyzing free text clinical notes from primary care practices. CLONE’s predictive clinical models using text mining and neural network approach to extract features to identify patterns. To demonstrate effectiveness, we evaluate CLONE’s ability in a case study to identify patients with a specific chronic condition: congestive heart failure (CHF). ResultsA random selected sample of 7500 patients from Electronic Medical Record Administrative data Linked Database (EMRALD) is used. In this dataset, each patient’s medical chart includes a reference standard, manually reviewed by medical practitioners. Prevalence of CHF is approximately 2%. The low prevalence leads to another challenging problem in machine learning: imbalanced datasets. After pre-processing, we build deep learning models to represent and extract important medical information from free text to identify CHF patients through analyzing patient charts. We evaluated the effectiveness of CLONE by comparing the predicted labels with the standard references on a holdout test dataset. Comparing it with a number of alternative algorithms, we improve the overall accuracy to over 90% on a test dataset. Conclusion/ImplicationsAs the role of NLP in EMR data expands, the CLONE natural language processing framework can lead to substantial reduction in manual processing, while improving predictive accuracy.

scholarly journals Cohort profile: St. Michael’s Hospital Tuberculosis Database (SMH-TB), a retrospective cohort of electronic health record data and variables extracted using natural language processing

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. e0247872
Author(s):  
David Landsman ◽  
Ahmed Abdelbasit ◽  
Christine Wang ◽  
Michael Guerzhoy ◽  
Ujash Joshi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Clinical Epidemiology ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Structured Data ◽  
Free Text ◽  
Electronic Health Record Data ◽  
Latent Tb ◽  
Electronic Health

Background Tuberculosis (TB) is a major cause of death worldwide. TB research draws heavily on clinical cohorts which can be generated using electronic health records (EHR), but granular information extracted from unstructured EHR data is limited. The St. Michael’s Hospital TB database (SMH-TB) was established to address gaps in EHR-derived TB clinical cohorts and provide researchers and clinicians with detailed, granular data related to TB management and treatment. Methods We collected and validated multiple layers of EHR data from the TB outpatient clinic at St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada to generate the SMH-TB database. SMH-TB contains structured data directly from the EHR, and variables generated using natural language processing (NLP) by extracting relevant information from free-text within clinic, radiology, and other notes. NLP performance was assessed using recall, precision and F1 score averaged across variable labels. We present characteristics of the cohort population using binomial proportions and 95% confidence intervals (CI), with and without adjusting for NLP misclassification errors. Results SMH-TB currently contains retrospective patient data spanning 2011 to 2018, for a total of 3298 patients (N = 3237 with at least 1 associated dictation). Performance of TB diagnosis and medication NLP rulesets surpasses 93% in recall, precision and F1 metrics, indicating good generalizability. We estimated 20% (95% CI: 18.4–21.2%) were diagnosed with active TB and 46% (95% CI: 43.8–47.2%) were diagnosed with latent TB. After adjusting for potential misclassification, the proportion of patients diagnosed with active and latent TB was 18% (95% CI: 16.8–19.7%) and 40% (95% CI: 37.8–41.6%) respectively Conclusion SMH-TB is a unique database that includes a breadth of structured data derived from structured and unstructured EHR data by using NLP rulesets. The data are available for a variety of research applications, such as clinical epidemiology, quality improvement and mathematical modeling studies.

scholarly journals Psychiatric stressor recognition from clinical notes to reveal association with suicide

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 1846-1862 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaoyun Zhang ◽  
Olivia R Zhang ◽  
Rui Li ◽  
Aaron Flores ◽  
Salih Selek ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Suicidal Behaviors ◽  
Statistical Association ◽  
Clinical Text ◽  
Clinical Notes ◽  
Electronic Health ◽  
F Measure

Suicide takes the lives of nearly a million people each year and it is a tremendous economic burden globally. One important type of suicide risk factor is psychiatric stress. Prior studies mainly use survey data to investigate the association between suicide and stressors. Very few studies have investigated stressor data in electronic health records, mostly due to the data being recorded in narrative text. This study takes the initiative to automatically extract and classify psychiatric stressors from clinical text using natural language processing–based methods. Suicidal behaviors were also identified by keywords. Then, a statistical association analysis between suicide ideations/attempts and stressors extracted from a clinical corpus is conducted. Experimental results show that our natural language processing method could recognize stressor entities with an F-measure of 89.01 percent. Mentions of suicidal behaviors were identified with an F-measure of 97.3 percent. The top three significant stressors associated with suicide are health, pressure, and death, which are similar to previous studies. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using natural language processing approaches to unlock information from psychiatric notes in electronic health record, to facilitate large-scale studies about associations between suicide and psychiatric stressors.

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