Title
Research Paper: Natural Language Processing Framework to Assess Clinical Conditions
Abstract
Objective: The authors developed a natural language processing (NLP) framework that could be used to extract clinical findings and diagnoses from dictated physician documentation. Design: De-identified documentation was made available by i2b2 Bio-informatics research group as a part of their NLP challenge focusing on obesity and its co-morbidities. The authors describe their approach, which used a combination of concept detection, context validation, and the application of a variety of rules to conclude patient diagnoses. Results: The framework was successful at correctly identifying diagnoses as judged by NLP challenge organizers when compared with a gold standard of physician annotations. The authors overall kappa values for agreement with the gold standard were 0.92 for explicit textual results and 0.91 for intuited results. The NLP framework compared favorably with those of the other entrants, placing third in textual results and fourth in intuited results in the i2b2 competition. Conclusions: The framework and approach used to detect clinical conditions was reasonably successful at extracting 1.6 diagnoses related to obesity. The system and methodology merits further development, targeting clinically useful applications.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1197/jamia.M3091
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association
Keywords
DocType
Volume
natural language processing,gold standard
Journal
16
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1067-5027
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Henry Ware1152.15
Charles J Mullett2295.26
V Jagannathan3192.23