Development and Assessment of a Pipeline for Extracting Structured Data From Free-Text Medical Reports Using a Large...

Medical free texts such as pathology reports contain valuable clinical data but are challenging to structure at scale. Traditional natural language processing approaches require extensive annotated data and training. We investigate the use of large language model (LLM) like Mistral to automatically extract three breast cancer (BC) biomarkers from pathology reports.

We developed and evaluated a pipeline combining Mistral Large LLM and a postprocessing phase. The pipeline's performance was assessed both at document and patient levels. For evaluation, two data sets were used: a data set of 1,152 pathology reports associated with 150 patients with BC focused solely on biomarker values and a gold standard database containing 101 patients with metastatic BC, enriched with detailed patient and tumor characteristics and double-blind validated by clinical research assistants. We also explored the pipeline's performance according to the use of a confidence prompt (CP), a chain of thought (CoT), and few-shot examples.

Our extraction pipeline achieved F1 scores of more than 95% and both recall and precision of more than 94% for each biomarker of interest (ie, estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 status and score) at the document level. At the patient level, the F1 score decreased between 87% and 90% with a greater drop in recall (ranging between 83% and 87%) compared with precision, which remained >90%. The results were similar whether the pipeline included a CP, CoT, or few-shot examples.

Our study provides strong evidence of the potential of LLMs like Mistral Large for extracting structured BC biomarker data from pathology reports and the potential of such methods for broader digital transformation of health care documents.