Clinical notes are an essential component of a health record. This paper evaluates how natural language processing (NLP) can be used to identify the risk of acute care use (ACU) in oncology patients, once chemotherapy starts. Risk prediction using structured health data (SHD) is now standard, but predictions using free-text formats are complex. This paper explores the use of free-text notes for the prediction of ACU instead of SHD. Deep Learning models were compared to manually engineered language features. Results show that SHD models minimally outperform NLP models; an l1-penalised logistic regression with SHD achieved a C-statistic of 0.748 (95%-CI: 0.735, 0.762), while the same model with language features achieved 0.730 (95%-CI: 0.717, 0.745) and a transformer-based model achieved 0.702 (95%-CI: 0.688, 0.717). This paper shows how language models can be used in clinical applications and underlines how risk bias is different for diverse patient groups, even using only free-text data.

本研究使用自然语言处理技术，比较了深度学习模型和手动工程化语言特征模型，在使用自由文本格式预测急性护理使用风险上的表现，结果表明，使用结构化健康数据模型能够最小限度地胜过NLP模型。

使用自然语言处理方法识别具有高急危重症风险的肿瘤患者临床记录