Evaluating the effectiveness of four contextual features in classifying annotated clinical conditions in emergency department reports.
OBJECTIVE
Determine how four contextual features (Validity, Certainty, Directionality, and Temporality) contribute to classification of respiratory syndrome-related clinical conditions as acute, chronic, or absent from manual annotations in Emergency Department Reports. Based on the results, we will direct our research towards automatic identification of the contextual features found to be discriminating.


METHODS
A physician annotated all instances of 56 clinical conditions in 120 ED reports and encoded four contextual features for every annotation. We classified clinical conditions using the contextual features and measured agreement to reference standard classifications made by the physician using a weighted kappa (Kw).


RESULTS
Kw was 0.518 when not using any of the features and 0.953 when using all of the features.


CONCLUSIONS
Validity, Directionality, and Temporality all improved accuracy. Negation(Directionality) was the most important feature for improving accuracy. Using Certainty made the classification worse.
Chu
David
D
Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Dowling
John N
JN
Chapman
Wendy W
WW
D000208:Acute Disease; D000465:Algorithms; D002908:Chronic Disease; D004636:Emergency Service, Hospital; D005568:Forms and Records Control; D006801:Humans; D008499:Medical Records; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D010865:Pilot Projects; D012140:Respiratory Tract Diseases / Q000145:classification*