Determining Follow-Up Imaging Study Using Radiology Reports.

Radiology reports often contain follow-up imaging recommendations. Failure to comply with these recommendations in a timely manner can lead to delayed treatment, poor patient outcomes, complications, unnecessary testing, lost revenue, and legal liability. The objective of this study was to develop a scalable approach to automatically identify the completion of a follow-up imaging study recommended by a radiologist in a preceding report. We selected imaging-reports containing 559 follow-up imaging recommendations and all subsequent reports from a multi-hospital academic practice. Three radiologists identified appropriate follow-up examinations among the subsequent reports for the same patient, if any, to establish a ground-truth dataset. We then trained an Extremely Randomized Trees that uses recommendation attributes, study meta-data and text similarity of the radiology reports to determine the most likely follow-up examination for a preceding recommendation. Pairwise inter-annotator F-score ranged from 0.853 to 0.868; the corresponding F-score of the classifier in identifying follow-up exams was 0.807. Our study describes a methodology to automatically determine the most likely follow-up exam after a follow-up imaging recommendation. The accuracy of the algorithm suggests that automated methods can be integrated into a follow-up management application to improve adherence to follow-up imaging recommendations. Radiology administrators could use such a system to monitor follow-up compliance rates and proactively send reminders to primary care providers and/or patients to improve adherence.

Identification of Incidental Pulmonary Nodules in Free-text Radiology Reports: An Initial Investigation.

Advances in image quality produced by computed tomography (CT) and the growth in the number of image studies currently performed has made the management of incidental pulmonary nodules (IPNs) a challenging task. This research aims to identify IPNs in radiology reports of chest and abdominal CT by Natural Language Processing techiniques to recognize IPN in sentences of radiology reports. Our preliminary analysis indicates vastly different pulmonary incidental findings rates for two different patient groups.

Follow-up Recommendation Detection on Radiology Reports with Incidental Pulmonary Nodules.

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.