title: TextHunter--A User Friendly Tool for Extracting Generic Concepts from Free Text in Clinical Research.
abstract: Observational research using data from electronic health records (EHR) is a rapidly growing area, which promises both increased sample size and data richness - therefore unprecedented study power. However, in many medical domains, large amounts of potentially valuable data are contained within the free text clinical narrative. Manually reviewing free text to obtain desired information is an inefficient use of researcher time and skill. Previous work has demonstrated the feasibility of applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) to extract information. However, in real world research environments, the demand for NLP skills outweighs supply, creating a bottleneck in the secondary exploitation of the EHR. To address this, we present TextHunter, a tool for the creation of training data, construction of concept extraction machine learning models and their application to documents. Using confidence thresholds to ensure high precision (>90%), we achieved recall measurements as high as 99% in real world use cases.
authors.affiliation: King's College London (Institute of Psychiatry), London, UK.
authors.forename: Richard G
authors.initials: RG
authors.lastname: Jackson MSc
authors.affiliation: King's College London (Institute of Psychiatry), London, UK.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ball
authors.affiliation: King's College London (Institute of Psychiatry), London, UK.
authors.forename: Rashmi
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Patel
authors.affiliation: King's College London (Institute of Psychiatry), London, UK.
authors.forename: Richard D
authors.initials: RD
authors.lastname: Hayes
authors.affiliation: King's College London (Institute of Psychiatry), London, UK.
authors.forename: Richard J B
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Dobson
authors.affiliation: King's College London (Institute of Psychiatry), London, UK.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Stewart
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D035843:Biomedical Research; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D012372:ROC Curve; D012984:Software; D060388:Support Vector Machine