Automatic Classification of Critical Findings in Radiology Reports

摘要

Communication of “actionable” findings in radiology reports is an important part of high quality medical care. Distinguishing radiology reports with “actionable” findings from other reports is currently a function of the radiologist and largely a manual process. This paper describes a system for automatic classification of patient’s radiology reports as it relates to the degree of severity of “actionable” findings provided by the radiology department at University of Massachusetts Medical School. This is done by using machine learning classifier on text based features. Several machine learning classification algorithms are evaluated and compared. Random forest classifier performed the best in this case while other classification methods also performed decently.