Health Analytics Archives

Natural language processing (NLP) tools for health analytics

Natural language processing (NLP) is the process of using computer algorithms to identify key elements in language and extract meaning from unstructured spoken or written text. NLP combines artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and other machine learning disciplines.

In the healthcare industry, NLP has many applications such as interpreting clinical documents in an electronic health record. Natural language processing is important in clinical decision support systems by extracting meaningful information from free-text query interfaces. It may reduce transcription costs by allowing providers to dictate their notes, or generate tailored educational materials for patients ready for discharge. At a high-level NLP includes processes such as structure extraction, tokenization, tagging, part of speech identification and lemmatization.

“cTAKES is a natural language processing system for extraction of information from electronic medical record clinical free-text. Originally developed at the Mayo Clinic, it has expanded to being used by various institutions internationally.”

cTAKES is relatively difficult to install and use, especially if the service needs to be shared by several systems. I have integrated cTakes into an easy to use spring boot application that provides REST web services for clinical document annotation. The repository is here.

[github-clone username=”dermatologist” repository=”ctakes-spring-boot”]

You need a UMLS username and password for deploying the application. RysannMD is an efficient and fast system for annotating clinical documents developed at Ryerson University. Some of my other experiments with NLP are available here.

Are you working on any NLP projects in medicine?

Published by Bell Eapen on October 5, 2018 | Permalink

Random forest model for predicting the total length of hospital stay (TLOS)

TL;DR here is the Random Forest classifier code:

And an (obvious) upfront disclaimer: This is a learning project. This is not for actual use.

DAD is a database consisting of patient demographics, comorbidities, interventions and the length of stay for the de-identified 10% sample of hospital admissions. DAD (2014-15) has an enhanced dataset with variables that were created at Western to act as flags for ICD-10 and CCI groupings, to make using the file easier.

Here is an experiment with the DAD enhanced dataset to create a Random forest model for predicting the total length of hospital stay (TLOS) in less than 100 lines of code. Random forests are an ensemble classifier, that operates by building multiple decision trees at training time and outputting the class that is the mode of the classes (classification) or mean prediction (regression) of the individual trees. This is a learning project for Apache Spark and Spark ML using pyspark. The accuracy of the model taking all derived categorical variables is low.

I have access to Apache Spark @ CC. If you are installing Spark in your computer you may have to change the following:

SparkContext.setSystemProperty('spark.executor.memory', '48g')
SparkContext.setSystemProperty('spark.driver.memory', '6g')

Some of the commonly tweaked parameters can be changed here:

RF_NUM_TREES = 3
RF_MAX_DEPTH = 4
RF_MAX_BINS = 12

Uncomment the following line to include only variables that you need.

# df.select([c for c in df.columns if c in ['TLOS_CAT', 'COLNAME', 'COLNAME']]).show()

Here is the repo. How can this model be improved? Maybe a PCA before the RF? or Am I missing something important?

Parts of this material are based on the Canadian Institute for Health Information Discharge Abstract Database Research Analytic Files (sampled from fiscal years 2014-15). However, the analysis, conclusions, opinions and statements expressed herein are those of the author(s) and not those of the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

Published by Bell Eapen on August 29, 2018 | Permalink