emtelliPro for Research by emtelligent  ·  10 minutes

Comparing Free-text to NLP-based Search for Medical Imaging Report Analysis and Cohort Identification

Historically, research in radiology was a labour-intensive process that involved reading a large number of imaging reports to identify the cohort of patients for a researcher’s criteria. Eventually, this manual effort was slightly improved with the use of free-text searches across imaging and/or EMR databases to narrow down the list of potential patient cohorts. However, this free-text approach has limited utility as it relies upon exact matching of specific terms and cannot understand or consider assertions about the terms, or synonyms, abbreviations, acronyms, or other variations that are common in medical text.