Automated Prediction of Glasgow Coma Scale Scores From Unstructured Electronic Health Records Using Natural Language...

Multicenter electronic health records (EHRs) can support quality improvement and comparative effectiveness research in critical care. However, limitations of EHR-based research include challenges in abstracting key clinical variables, including a patient's level of consciousness.

This study aimed to develop a natural language processing model to predict Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) scores from daily EHR notes.

The study included adult patients (aged ≥18 years) admitted to Mass General Brigham (MGB) hospitals (2017-2024) and patients from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care-III (MIMIC-III version 1.4; 2001-2012) database. A dataset of all patients from both institutions was split into training (70%) or hold-out test (30%) sets. Variables consisted of daily notes, age, sex, and admission type. A pooled ordinal regression model (ordinalNet) with an elastic net penalty was trained to predict the lowest daily level of consciousness across 3 classes of impairment: severe (GCS score 3-8), moderate (GCS score 9-12), and mild (GCS score 13-15), and a pooled linear model was trained to predict continuous GCS scores (3-15). Gold standard GCS was obtained from structured flowsheet data. External generalizability was assessed using a single-institution ordinal model trained on MGB and tested on MIMIC. Following post hoc calibration, the performance of the ordinal and linear models was evaluated on the hold-out test sets using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) for the ordinal models and root mean square error and Pearson correlation coefficient for the linear models.

The modeling cohort included 145,897 patients (MGB: n=123,257, MIMIC: n=22,640), with 1,446,965 days of hospitalization between training and testing sets; the average age was 62 (SD 18) years, and the sex distribution was balanced. The pooled ordinalNet achieved an AUROC of 0.96 (95% CI 0.96-0.96) and an AUPRC of 0.77 (95% CI 0.76-0.77). The single-institution ordinal model achieved an AUROC of 0.90 (95% CI 0.89-0.90) and an AUPRC of 0.80 (95% CI 0.79-0.80). The pooled linear model achieved a root mean square error of 2.30 (95% CI 2.30-2.30) and a correlation of 0.76 (95% CI 0.76-0.76). Predictions for severe GCS were driven by terms indicating unresponsiveness and critical interventions, moderate GCS by intermediate alertness descriptors, and mild GCS by mentions of normal or awake behavior.

Pooled ordinal and linear models can accurately predict GCS from unstructured data and can support large-scale phenotyping of neurological assessments for future critical care research.