TEXTINFO: a tool for automatic determination of patient clinical profiles using text analysis

The clinical data contained in narrative patient documents is made available via grammatical and semantic processing. Retrievals from the resulting relational database tables are matched against a set of clinical descriptors to obtain clinical profiles of the patients in terms of the descriptors present in the documents. Discharge summaries of 57 Dept. of Digestive Surgery patients were processed in this manner. Factor analysis and discriminant analysis procedures were then applied, showing the profiles to be useful for diagnosis definitions (by establishing relations between diagnoses and clinical findings), for diagnosis assessment (by viewing the match between a definition and observed events recorded in a patient text), and potentially for outcome evaluation based on the classification abilities of clinical signs.