Follow-up Recommendation Detection on Radiology Reports with Incidental Pulmonary Nodules
Oliveira Lucas, Ranjith Tellis, Qian Yuechen, KAREN I. TROVATO, Gabe Mankovich · Studies in health technology and informatics · 2015
The management of follow-up recommendations is fundamental for the appropriate care of patients with incidental pulmonary findings. The lack of communication of these important findings can result in important actionable information being lost in healthcare provider electronic documents. This study aims to analyze follow-up recommendations in radiology reports containing pulmonary incidental findings by using Natural Language Processing and Regular Expressions. Our evaluation highlights the different follow-up recommendation rates for oncology and non-oncology patient cohorts. The results reveal the need for a context-sensitive approach to tracking different patient cohorts in an enterprise-wide assessment.