An efficient pancreatic cyst identification methodology using natural language processing

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, mostly diagnosed at late stages. Patients with pancreatic cysts are at higher risk of developing cancer and their surveillance can help to diagnose the disease in earlier stages. In this retrospective study we collected a corpus of 1064 records from 44 patients at Indiana University Hospital from 1990 to 2012. A Natural Language Processing (NLP) system was developed and used to identify patients with pancreatic cysts. NegEx algorithm was used initially to identify the negation status of concepts that resulted in precision and recall of 98.9% and 89% respectively. Stanford Dependency parser (SDP) was then used to improve the NegEx performance resulting in precision of 98.9% and recall of 95.7%. Features related to pancreatic cysts were also extracted from patient medical records using regex and NegEx algorithm with 98.5% precision and 97.43% recall. SDP improved the NegEx algorithm by increasing the recall to 98.12%.