Impact of Professional Background on Inter-Annotator Variability and Accuracy During Annotation of Clinical Notes.

BACKGROUND: The aging population's need for treatment of chronic diseases is exhibiting a marked increase in urgency, with heart failure being one of the most severe diseases in this regard. To improve outpatient care of these patients and reduce hospitalization rates, the telemedical disease management program HerzMobil was developed in the past. OBJECTIVE: This work aims to analyze the inter-annotator variability among two professional groups (healthcare and engineering) involved in this program's annotation process of free-text clinical notes using categories. METHODS: A dataset of 1,300 text snippets was annotated by 13 annotators with different backgrounds. Inter-annotator variability and accuracy were evaluated using the F1-score and analyzed for differences between categories, annotators, and their professional backgrounds. RESULTS: The results show a significant difference between note categories concerning inter-annotator variability (p<0.0001) and accuracy (p<0.0001). However, there was no statistically significant difference between the two annotator groups, neither concerning inter-annotator variability (p=0.15) nor accuracy (p=0.84). CONCLUSION: Professional background had no significant impact on the annotation of free-text HerzMobil notes.

Progression of arteriovenous bypass restenosis in mice exposed to a 50 Hz magnetic field.

The controversy over whether magnetic fields (MF) produced by electrical wiring and appliances contribute to diseases such as cancer has been debated in the literature for more than 2 decades. These extremely low frequency fields at 50 or 60 Hz are omnipresent in the industrialized world and have been linked to various forms of cancer by epidemiological studies. Little has been published investigating any possible role of MF and cardiovascular disease, and this is the first study looking specifically at the effect of exposure to high-intensity MF on the development and progression of restenosis. A mouse arteriovenous bypass model was used, and mice were exposed to MF for periods of 1, 2, or 3 weeks. Neointima formation, infiltration of mononuclear cells, and heat shock protein 60 expression were all studied at the conclusion of the exposure regimen. Animals exposed to the MF for 1 week showed significantly smaller neointima formation compared with control mice exposed to a null field, although this difference was not observed in mice exposed for 2 or 3 weeks. No difference was found between mice exposed to MF and controls in any of the other parameters investigated.