Natural language processing and recurrent network models for identifying genomic mutation-associated cancer treatment change from patient progress notes

Objectives: Natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning approaches were used to build classifiers to identify genomic-related treatment changes in the free-text visit progress notes of cancer patients.

Methods: We obtained 5,889 de-identified progress reports (2,439 words on average) for 755 cancer patients who have undergone a clinical Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) testing in Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center for our data analyses. An NLP system was implemented to process the free-text data and extract NGS-related information. Three types of recurrent neural network (RNN) namely, gated recurrent unit (GRU), long-short term memory (LSTM), and bidirectional LSTM (LSTM_Bi) were applied to classify documents to the treatment-change and no-treatment-change groups. Further, we compared the performances of RNNs to five machine learning algorithms including Naive Bayes (NB), K-nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machine for classification (SVC), Random Forest ...