A text-mining approach to obtain detailed treatment information from free-text fields in population-based cancer registries: A study of non-small cell lung cancer in California

摘要

BackgroundPopulation-based cancer registries have treatment information for all patients making them an excellent resource for population-level monitoring. However, specific treatment details, such as drug names, are contained in a free-text format that is difficult to process and summarize. We assessed the accuracy and efficiency of a text-mining algorithm to identify systemic treatments for lung cancer from free-text fields in the California Cancer Registry.