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ABSTRACT: Objective
To evaluate a proposed natural language processing (NLP) and machine-learning based automated method to risk stratify abdominal pain patients by analyzing the content of the electronic health record (EHR).Methods
We analyzed the EHRs of a random sample of 2100 pediatric emergency department (ED) patients with abdominal pain, including all with a final diagnosis of appendicitis. We developed an automated system to extract relevant elements from ED physician notes and lab values and to automatically assign a risk category for acute appendicitis (high, equivocal, or low), based on the Pediatric Appendicitis Score. We evaluated the performance of the system against a manually created gold standard (chart reviews by ED physicians) for recall, specificity, and precision.Results
The system achieved an average F-measure of 0.867 (0.869 recall and 0.863 precision) for risk classification, which was comparable to physician experts. Recall/precision were 0.897/0.952 in the low-risk category, 0.855/0.886 in the high-risk category, and 0.854/0.766 in the equivocal-risk category. The information that the system required as input to achieve high F-measure was available within the first 4 h of the ED visit.Conclusions
Automated appendicitis risk categorization based on EHR content, including information from clinical notes, shows comparable performance to physician chart reviewers as measured by their inter-annotator agreement and represents a promising new approach for computerized decision support to promote application of evidence-based medicine at the point of care.
SUBMITTER: Deleger L
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3861926 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Dec
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Deleger Louise L Brodzinski Holly H Zhai Haijun H Li Qi Q Lingren Todd T Kirkendall Eric S ES Alessandrini Evaline E Solti Imre I
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA 20131015 e2
<h4>Objective</h4>To evaluate a proposed natural language processing (NLP) and machine-learning based automated method to risk stratify abdominal pain patients by analyzing the content of the electronic health record (EHR).<h4>Methods</h4>We analyzed the EHRs of a random sample of 2100 pediatric emergency department (ED) patients with abdominal pain, including all with a final diagnosis of appendicitis. We developed an automated system to extract relevant elements from ED physician notes and lab ...[more]