NLPReViz: an interactive tool for natural language processing on clinical text

J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2018 Jan 1;25(1):81-87. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocx070.

Abstract

The gap between domain experts and natural language processing expertise is a barrier to extracting understanding from clinical text. We describe a prototype tool for interactive review and revision of natural language processing models of binary concepts extracted from clinical notes. We evaluated our prototype in a user study involving 9 physicians, who used our tool to build and revise models for 2 colonoscopy quality variables. We report changes in performance relative to the quantity of feedback. Using initial training sets as small as 10 documents, expert review led to final F1scores for the "appendiceal-orifice" variable between 0.78 and 0.91 (with improvements ranging from 13.26% to 29.90%). F1for "biopsy" ranged between 0.88 and 0.94 (-1.52% to 11.74% improvements). The average System Usability Scale score was 70.56. Subjective feedback also suggests possible design improvements.

Keywords: electronic health records; machine learning; medical informatics; natural language processing (NLP); user-computer interface.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Attitude of Health Personnel
  • Colonoscopy
  • Electronic Health Records*
  • Humans
  • Information Storage and Retrieval / methods*
  • Machine Learning*
  • Natural Language Processing*
  • Physicians
  • Software
  • User-Computer Interface*