Automated Extraction of Stroke Severity from Unstructured Electronic Health Records using Natural Language Processing

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Multi-center electronic health records (EHR) can support quality improvement initiatives and comparative effectiveness research in stroke care. However, limitations of EHR-based research include challenges in abstracting key clinical variables from non-structured data at scale. This is further compounded by missing data. Here we develop a natural language processing (NLP) model that automatically reads EHR notes to determine the NIH stroke scale (NIHSS) score of patients with acute stroke. METHODS: The study included notes from acute stroke patients (>= 18 years) admitted to the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) (2015-2022). The MGH data were divided into training (70%) and hold-out test (30%) sets. A two-stage model was developed to predict the admission NIHSS. A linear model with the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) was trained within the training set. For notes in the test set where the NIHSS was documented, the scores were extracted using regular expressions (stage 1), for notes where NIHSS was not documented, LASSO was used for prediction (stage 2). The reference standard for NIHSS was obtained from Get With The Guidelines Stroke Registry. The two-stage model was tested on the hold-out test set and validated in the MIMIC-III dataset (Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care-MIMIC III 2001-2012) v1.4, using root mean squared error (RMSE) and Spearman correlation (SC). RESULTS: We included 4,163 patients (MGH = 3,876; MIMIC = 287); average age of 69 [SD 15] years; 53% male, and 72% white. 90% patients had ischemic stroke and 10% hemorrhagic stroke. The two-stage model achieved a RMSE [95% CI] of 3.13 [2.86-3.41] (SC = 0.90 [0.88-0. 91]) in the MGH hold-out test set and 2.01 [1.58-2.38] (SC = 0.96 [0.94-0.97]) in the MIMIC validation set. CONCLUSIONS: The automatic NLP-based model can enable large-scale stroke severity phenotyping from EHR and therefore support real-world quality improvement and comparative effectiveness studies in stroke.