Pattern-based information extraction from pathology reports for cancer registration.
OBJECTIVE
To evaluate precision and recall rates for the automatic extraction of information from free-text pathology reports. To assess the impact that implementation of pattern-based methods would have on cancer registration completeness.


METHODS
Over 300,000 electronic pathology reports were scanned for the extraction of Gleason score, Clark level and Breslow depth, by a number of Perl routines progressively enhanced by a trial-and-error method. An additional test set of 915 reports potentially containing Gleason score was used for evaluation.


RESULTS
Values for recall and precision of over 98 and 99%, respectively, were easily reached. Potential increase in cancer staging completeness of up to 32% was proved.


CONCLUSIONS
In cancer registration, simple pattern matching applied to free-text documents can be effectively used to improve completeness and accuracy of pathology information.
Napolitano
Giulio
G
Northern Ireland Cancer Registry, Centre for Public Health, Queen's University of Belfast, Mulhouse Building, Grosvenor Road, Belfast BT12 6BJ, Northern Ireland, UK. g.napolitano@qub.ac.uk
Fox
Colin
C
Middleton
Richard
R
Connolly
David
D
D006801:Humans; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized; D009367:Neoplasm Staging; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated; D012042:Registries