Natural Language Processing of Serum Protein Electrophoresis Reports in the Veterans Affairs Health Care System.
Journal:
JCO clinical cancer informatics
PMID:
32813561
Abstract
PURPOSE: Serum protein electrophoresis (SPEP) is a clinical tool used to screen for monoclonal gammopathy, thus it is a critical tool in the evaluation of patients with multiple myeloma. However, SPEP laboratory results are usually returned as short text reports, which are not amenable to simple computerized processing for large-scale studies. We applied natural language processing (NLP) to detect monoclonal gammopathy in SPEP laboratory results and compared its performance at multiple hospitals using both a rules-based manual system and a machine-learning algorithm.