title: Extracting data from electronic medical records: validation of a natural language processing program to assess prostate biopsy results.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The extraction of specific data from electronic medical records (EMR) remains tedious and is often performed manually. Natural language processing (NLP) programs have been developed to identify and extract information within clinical narrative text. We performed a study to assess the validity of an NLP program to accurately identify patients with prostate cancer and to retrieve pertinent pathologic information from their EMR.
  
  
  METHODS
  A retrospective review was performed of a prospectively collected database including patients from the Southern California Kaiser Permanente Medical Region that underwent prostate biopsies during a 2-week period. A NLP program was used to identify patients with prostate biopsies that were positive for prostatic adenocarcinoma from all pathology reports within this period. The application then processed 100 consecutive patients with prostate adenocarcinoma to extract 10 variables from their pathology reports. The extraction and retrieval of information by NLP was then compared to a blinded manual review.
  
  
  RESULTS
  A consecutive series of 18,453 pathology reports were evaluated. NLP correctly detected 117 out of 118 patients (99.1%) with prostatic adenocarcinoma after TRUS-guided prostate biopsy. NLP had a positive predictive value of 99.1% with a 99.1% sensitivity and a 99.9% specificity to correctly identify patients with prostatic adenocarcinoma after biopsy. The overall ability of the NLP application to accurately extract variables from the pathology reports was 97.6%.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Natural language processing is a reliable and accurate method to identify select patients and to extract relevant data from an existing EMR in order to establish a prospective clinical database.
authors: Department of Urology, Los Angeles Medical Center, Kaiser Permanente, 4900 Sunset Blvd, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, CA, 90027, USA, anil.a.thomas@kp.org.
authors: Anil A
authors: AA
authors: Thomas
authors: Chengyi
authors: C
authors: Zheng
authors: Howard
authors: H
authors: Jung
authors: Allen
authors: A
authors: Chang
authors: Brian
authors: B
authors: Kim
authors: Joy
authors: J
authors: Gelfond
authors: Jeff
authors: J
authors: Slezak
authors: Kim
authors: K
authors: Porter
authors: Steven J
authors: SJ
authors: Jacobsen
authors: Gary W
authors: GW
authors: Chien
mesh_terms: D000230:Adenocarcinoma / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000473:pathology; D001706:Biopsy; D002140:California; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D057286:Electronic Health Records / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D011467:Prostate / Q000473:pathology*; D011471:Prostatic Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000473:pathology; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity