2019 Articles
Complexities, variations, and errors of numbering within clinical notes: the potential impact on information extraction and cohort-identification
Background
Numbers and numerical concepts appear frequently in free text clinical notes from electronic health records. Knowledge of the frequent lexical variations of these numerical concepts, and their accurate identification, is important for many information extraction tasks. This paper describes an analysis of the variation in how numbers and numerical concepts are represented in clinical notes.
Methods
We used an inverted index of approximately 100 million notes to obtain the frequency of various permutations of numbers and numerical concepts, including the use of Roman numerals, numbers spelled as English words, and invalid dates, among others. Overall, twelve types of lexical variants were analyzed.
Results
We found substantial variation in how these concepts were represented in the notes, including multiple data quality issues. We also demonstrate that not considering these variations could have substantial real-world implications for cohort identification tasks, with one case missing > 80% of potential patients.
Conclusions
Numbering within clinical notes can be variable, and not taking these variations into account could result in missing or inaccurate information for natural language processing and information retrieval tasks.
Files
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12911_2019_Article_784.pdf application/pdf 237 KB Download File
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More About This Work
- Published Here
- December 20, 2022
Notes
Lexical variation, Natural language processing, Information retrieval