Using Topic Segmentation to Enhance Concept Parsing and Identification of Negations [Methods Study], Massachusetts, 2019-2023 (ICPSR 39740)
Clinical notes in electronic health records, or EHRs, may contain information that can help researchers study and compare treatments. But it takes researchers a lot of time to find information in EHR notes.
Natural language processing, or NLP, methods can help researchers find information in EHR notes. With NLP, computer programs read and identify written language to make it easier to sort and study. But in EHR notes, some sentences may contain more than one topic. Also, EHR notes may discuss a single topic over many sentences. In these cases, current NLP methods don't work well to find complete and accurate information about a specific topic.
In this study, the research team developed and tested new NLP methods to identify topics from EHR notes.