Applying Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing in Cancer: A Survey

Predicting the Survival of Patients With Cancer From Their Initial Oncology Consultation Document Using Natural Language Processing

“… 10 , 11 , 12 Many of the applications both in medicine generally and cancer specifically have utilized smaller, specific documents such as radiology or pathology reports. 13 , 14 Some studies such as that by Liu et al 15 have used patient encounter documents to predict the onset of 3 noncancer illnesses. They found that models using the unstructured text data in these documents outperformed using only structured data, and that adding structured data like demographics and laboratory data increased performance by only a marginal amount.…”

“…When utilized in NLP, neural models can develop a more complex understanding of language, such as the presence of words with respect to each other, even when not adjacent. 4 We were unable to find prior work using neural NLP methods to predict the survival of patients with general cancer using oncologist consultation documents, nor were such works identified in recent reviews of neural network applications in cancer, 13 in general medical applications, 11 or in a recent review of machine learning techniques used in cancer survival prediction. 18 Our work sought to develop and evaluate neural NLP models that predict the survival of patients with general cancer using their initial oncologist consultation, without the use of structured data.…”

“…The use of machine learning with documents, known as natural language processing (NLP), has increasingly been applied throughout medicine . Many of the applications both in medicine generally and cancer specifically have utilized smaller, specific documents such as radiology or pathology reports . Some studies such as that by Liu et al have used patient encounter documents to predict the onset of 3 noncancer illnesses.…”