Evaluation of Natural Language Processing for the Identification of Crohn Disease-Related Variables in Spanish Electronic Health Records:A Validation Study for the PREMONITION-CD Project

Montoto, C. ; Gisbert, J.P. ; Guerra, I. ; Plaza, R. ; Pajares Villarroya, R. ; Moreno Almazán, L. ; López Martín, M. Del Carmen ; Domínguez Antonaya, M. ; Vera Mendoza, I. ; Aparicio, J. ; Martínez, V. ; Tagarro, I. ; Fernandez-Nistal, A. ; Canales, L. ; Menke, S. ; Gomollón, F. (Universidad de Zaragoza)

Resumen: Background: The exploration of clinically relevant information in the free text of electronic health records (EHRs) holds the potential to positively impact clinical practice as well as knowledge regarding Crohn disease (CD), an inflammatory bowel disease that may affect any segment of the gastrointestinal tract. The EHRead technology, a clinical natural language processing (cNLP) system, was designed to detect and extract clinical information from narratives in the clinical notes contained in EHRs. Objective: The aim of this study is to validate the performance of the EHRead technology in identifying information of patients with CD. Methods: We used the EHRead technology to explore and extract CD-related clinical information from EHRs. To validate this tool, we compared the output of the EHRead technology with a manually curated gold standard to assess the quality of our cNLP system in detecting records containing any reference to CD and its related variables. Results: The validation metrics for the main variable (CD) were a precision of 0.88, a recall of 0.98, and an F1 score of 0.93. Regarding the secondary variables, we obtained a precision of 0.91, a recall of 0.71, and an F1 score of 0.80 for CD flare, while for the variable vedolizumab (treatment), a precision, recall, and F1 score of 0.86, 0.94, and 0.90 were obtained, respectively. Conclusions: This evaluation demonstrates the ability of the EHRead technology to identify patients with CD and their related variables from the free text of EHRs. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to use a cNLP system for the identification of CD in EHRs written in Spanish. © 2022 JMIR Medical Informatics. All rights reserved.

Idioma: Inglés

DOI: 10.2196/30345

Año: 2022

Publicado en: JMIR medical informatics 10, 2 (2022), e30345 [9 pp.]
ISSN: 2291-9694

Factor impacto JCR: 3.2 (2022)

Categ. JCR: MEDICAL INFORMATICS rank: 18 / 31 = 0.581 (2022) - Q3 - T2

Factor impacto CITESCORE: 5.6 - Health Professions (Q1) - Medicine (Q1)

Factor impacto SCIMAGO: 0.963 - Health Information Management (Q2) - Health Informatics (Q2)

Tipo y forma: Artículo (Versión definitiva)

Área (Departamento): Area Medicina (Dpto. Medicina, Psiqu. y Derm.)