Semiautomated Approach for Muscle Weakness Detection in Clinical Texts.

The automated detection of adverse events in medical records might be a cost-effective solution for patient safety management or pharmacovigilance. Our group proposed an information extraction algorithm (IEA) for detecting adverse events in neurosurgery using documents written in a natural rich-in-morphology language. In this paper, we challenge to optimize and evaluate its performance for the detection of any extremity muscle weakness in clinical texts. Our algorithm shows the accuracy of 0.96 and ROC AUC = 0.96 and might be easily implemented in other medical domains.

Detection of Muscle Weakness in Medical Texts Using Natural Language Processing.

Identifying adverse events in clinical documents is demanded in retrospective clinical research and prospective monitoring of treatment safety and cost-effectiveness. We proposed and evaluated a few methods of semi-automated muscle weakness detection in preoperative clinical notes for a larger project on predicting paresis by images. The combination of semi-expert and machine learning methods demonstrated maximized sensitivity = 0.860 and specificity = 0.919, and largest AUC = 0.943 with a 95% CI [0.874; 0.991], outperforming each method used individually. Our approaches are expected to be effective for autoshaping a well- verified training dataset for supervised machine learning.