Surgical classification using natural language processing of informed consent forms in spine surgery.

Journal: Neurosurgical focus
PMID:

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: In clinical spine surgery research, manually reviewing surgical forms to categorize patients by their surgical characteristics is a crucial yet time-consuming task. Natural language processing (NLP) is a machine learning tool used to adaptively parse and categorize important features from text. These systems function by training on a large, labeled data set in which feature importance is learned prior to encountering a previously unseen data set. The authors aimed to design an NLP classifier for surgical information that can review consent forms and automatically classify patients by the surgical procedure performed.

Authors

  • Michael D Shost
    1Case Western Reserve University, School of Medicine.
  • Seth M Meade
    1Case Western Reserve University, School of Medicine.
  • Michael P Steinmetz
    Department of Neurosurgery, 660 S Euclid Ave., Box 8057, St. Louis, MO 63110, USA.
  • Thomas E Mroz
    2Center for Spine Health, Neurologic Institute, Cleveland Clinic Foundation; and.
  • Ghaith Habboub
    1Department of Neurosurgery, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland; and.