title: Classification of clinically useful sentences in clinical evidence resources.
abstract: Most patient care questions raised by clinicians can be answered by online clinical knowledge resources. However, important barriers still challenge the use of these resources at the point of care.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To design and assess a method for extracting clinically useful sentences from synthesized online clinical resources that represent the most clinically useful information for directly answering clinicians' information needs.
  
  
  METHODS
  We developed a Kernel-based Bayesian Network classification model based on different domain-specific feature types extracted from sentences in a gold standard composed of 18 UpToDate documents. These features included UMLS concepts and their semantic groups, semantic predications extracted by SemRep, patient population identified by a pattern-based natural language processing (NLP) algorithm, and cue words extracted by a feature selection technique. Algorithm performance was measured in terms of precision, recall, and F-measure.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The feature-rich approach yielded an F-measure of 74% versus 37% for a feature co-occurrence method (p<0.001). Excluding predication, population, semantic concept or text-based features reduced the F-measure to 62%, 66%, 58% and 69% respectively (p<0.01). The classifier applied to Medline sentences reached an F-measure of 73%, which is equivalent to the performance of the classifier on UpToDate sentences (p=0.62).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The feature-rich approach significantly outperformed general baseline methods. This approach significantly outperformed classifiers based on a single type of feature. Different types of semantic features provided a unique contribution to overall classification performance. The classifier's model and features used for UpToDate generalized well to Medline abstracts.
authors.affiliation: Department of Operations and Information Systems, David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
authors.forename: Mohammad Amin
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Morid
authors.affiliation: Lister Hill Center, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Marcelo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fiszman
authors.affiliation: Department of Preventive Medicine, Division of Health and Biomedical Informatics, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Kalpana
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Raja
authors.affiliation: Department of Preventive Medicine, Division of Health and Biomedical Informatics, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Siddhartha R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Jonnalagadda
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA. Electronic address: guilherme.delfiol@utah.edu.
authors.forename: Guilherme
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Del Fiol
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D020000:Decision Support Systems, Clinical; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D007802:Language; D016239:MEDLINE; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D012660:Semantics; D000069553:Supervised Machine Learning; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D017432:Unified Medical Language System
keywords: Clinical decision support; Machine learning; Natural language processing; Text summarization