Automatic classification of free-text medical causes from death certificates for reactive mortality surveillance in France.
Journal:
International journal of medical informatics
PMID:
31522022
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Mortality surveillance is of fundamental importance to public health surveillance. The real-time recording of death certificates, thanks to Electronic Death Registration System (EDRS), provides valuable data for reactive mortality surveillance based on medical causes of death in free-text format. Reactive mortality surveillance is based on the monitoring of mortality syndromic groups (MSGs). An MSG is a cluster of medical causes of death (pathologies, syndromes or symptoms) that meets the objectives of early detection and impact assessment of public health events. The aim of this study is to implement and measure the performance of a rule-based method and two supervised models for automatic free-text cause of death classification from death certificates in order to implement them for routine surveillance.