Automatic Inference of BI-RADS Final Assessment Categories from Narrative Mammography Report Findings. Journal of biomedical informatics Banerjee, I., Bozkurt, S., Alkim, E., Sagreiya, H., Kurian, A. W., Rubin, D. L. 2019: 103137

Abstract

We propose an efficient natural language processing approach for inferring the BI-RADS final assessment categories by analyzing only the mammogram findings reported by the mammographer in narrative form. The proposed hybrid method integrates semantic term embedding with distributional semantics, producing a context-aware vector representation of unstructured mammography reports. A large corpus of unannotated mammography reports (300,000) was used to learn the context of the key-terms using a distributional semantics approach, and the trained model was applied to generate context-aware vector representations of the reports annotated with BI-RADS category(22,091). The vectorized reports were utilized to train a supervised classifier to derive the BI-RADS assessment class. Even though the majority of the proposed embedding pipeline is unsupervised, the classifier was able to recognize substantial semantic information for deriving the BI-RADS categorization not only on a holdout internal testset and also on an external validation set (1,900 reports). Our proposed method outperforms a recently published domain-specific rule-based system and could be relevant for evaluating concordance between radiologists. With minimal requirement for task specific customization, the proposed method can be easily transferable to a different domain to support large scale text mining or derivation of patient phenotype.

View details for DOI 10.1016/j.jbi.2019.103137

View details for PubMedID 30807833