title: Facilitating post-surgical complication detection through sublanguage analysis.
abstract: Identification of postsurgical complications is the first step towards improving patient safety and health care quality as well as reducing heath care cost. Existing NLP-based approaches for retrieving postsurgical complications are based on search strategies. Here, we conduct a sublanguage analysis study using free text reports available for a cohort of patients with postsurgical complications identified manually to compare the keywords identified by subject matter experts with words/phrases automatically identified by sublanguage analysis. The results suggest that search-based approaches may miss some cases and the sublanguage analysis results can be used as a base to develop an information extraction system or support search-based NLP approaches by augmenting search queries.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Sciences Research, Rochester, MN 55905.
authors.forename: Hongfang
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Sciences Research, Rochester, MN 55905.
authors.forename: Sunghwan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sohn
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Sciences Research, Rochester, MN 55905.
authors.forename: Sean
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Murphy
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, MN 55905.
authors.forename: Jenna
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lovely
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Sciences Research, Rochester, MN 55905 ; Department of Surgery Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, MN 55905.
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Burton
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Sciences Research, Rochester, MN 55905.
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Naessens
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, MN 55905.
authors.forename: David W
authors.initials: DW
authors.lastname: Larson