Causal Associations Among Diseases and Imaging Findings in Radiology Reports

This study explored the ability to identify causal relationships between diseases and imaging findings from their co-occurrences in radiology reports. A natural language processing (NLP) system with negative-expression filtering detected positive mentions of 16,912 disorders, interventions, and imaging findings in 1,702,462 consecutive radiology reports; the 55,564 causal relations defined by the Radiology Gamuts Ontology (RGO) served as reference standard. Conditions were considered to co-occur if they were present in reports from the same patient. The ϕ and κ statistics both achieved AUC0.70, P<0.001 in identifying causal relationships from pairwise co-occurrence data. Analysis of radiology reports can identify a large proportion of known causal associations among diseases and imaging findings. Automated approaches hold promise to identify causal relationships among diseases and imaging findings from their co-occurrence in text-based radiology reports.