Topic modeling of maintenance logs for linac failure modes and trends identification

Medical linear accelerators (linacs) can fail in a multitude of different manners due to complex structures. An unclear identification of failure modes occurring constantly is a major obstacle to maintenance arrangements, thereby may increasing downtime. This study aims to use natural language processing techniques to deal with the unformatted maintenance logs to identify the linac failure modes and trends over time.

The data used in our study are unformatted narrative maintenance logs recording linac conditions and repair actions. The latent Dirichlet allocation-based topic modeling method was used to identify topics and keywords regarding the failure modes. The temporal analysis method was applied to examine the variation of failure modes over 20 years.

Based on the output of the topic modeling, 28 topics and keywords with frequency ranking were generated automatically. The latent failure modes in topics were identified and classified into six main subsystems of linacs. Furthermore, by using the temporal analysis method, the trends of all failure modes over 20 years were illustrated. Half of the topics demonstrated variations with three different patterns, namely periodic, increasing, and decreasing.

The results of our study validated the effectiveness of using the topic modeling method to automatically analyze narrative maintenance logs. With domain knowledge, failure modes of linacs can be identified and categorized quantitatively.