Application of Natural Language Processing in Total Joint Arthroplasty: Opportunities and Challenges

Total joint arthroplasty is becoming one of the most common surgeries within the United States, creating an abundance of analyzable data to improve patient experience and outcomes. Unfortunately, a large majority of this data is concealed in electronic health records only accessible by manual extraction, which takes extensive time and resources. Natural language processing (NLP), a field within artificial intelligence, may offer a viable alternative to manual extraction. Using NLP, a researcher can analyze written and spoken data and extract data in an organized manner suitable for future research and clinical use. This article will first discuss common subtasks involved in an NLP pipeline, including data preparation, modeling, analysis, and external validation, followed by examples of NLP projects. Challenges and limitations of NLP will be discussed, closing with future directions of NLP projects, including large language models.