title: Retrieval of radiology reports citing critical findings with disease-specific customization.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Communication of critical results from diagnostic procedures between caregivers is a Joint Commission national patient safety goal. Evaluating critical result communication often requires manual analysis of voluminous data, especially when reviewing unstructured textual results of radiologic findings. Information retrieval (IR) tools can facilitate this process by enabling automated retrieval of radiology reports that cite critical imaging findings. However, IR tools that have been developed for one disease or imaging modality often need substantial reconfiguration before they can be utilized for another disease entity.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  THIS PAPER: 1) describes the process of customizing two Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval/Extraction applications - an open-source toolkit, A Nearly New Information Extraction system (ANNIE); and an application developed in-house, Information for Searching Content with an Ontology-Utilizing Toolkit (iSCOUT) - to illustrate the varying levels of customization required for different disease entities and; 2) evaluates each application's performance in identifying and retrieving radiology reports citing critical imaging findings for three distinct diseases, pulmonary nodule, pneumothorax, and pulmonary embolus.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Both applications can be utilized for retrieval. iSCOUT and ANNIE had precision values between 0.90-0.98 and recall values between 0.79 and 0.94. ANNIE had consistently higher precision but required more customization.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Understanding the customizations involved in utilizing NLP applications for various diseases will enable users to select the most suitable tool for specific tasks.
authors.affiliation: Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School, 20 Kent St., 2nd Floor, Brookline MA 02445, USA.
authors.forename: Ronilda
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lacson
authors.forename: Nathanael
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Sugarbaker
authors.forename: Luciano M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Prevedello
authors.forename: Ip
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Ivan
authors.forename: Wendy
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Mar
authors.forename: Katherine P
authors.initials: KP
authors.lastname: Andriole
authors.forename: Ramin
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Khorasani