National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) Annotations for the MIMIC-III Database

The National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) is a 15-item neurologic
examination stroke scale. It quantifies the physical manifestations of
neurological deficits and provides crucial support for clinical decision
making and early-stage emergency triage. NIHSS scores stored in the free-text
of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) often lack standardization and the
expression patterns are highly dependent on the habit of the clinicians. This
can limit the potential for reusability of the data.

There is benefit in developing robust algorithms to extract NIHSS scores from
the free-text of EHRs. We developed a dataset for NIHSS score identification,
a task defined as the extraction of scale items and corresponding scores from
discharge summaries. Discharge summaries of stroke cases in the Medical
Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC-III) database were used to
create an annotated NIHSS corpus.

Each discharge summary was manually annotated for the presence of NIHSS scores
by two annotators with backgrounds in medical informatics. Annotations include
all scale items (e.g. "4\. Facial Palsy"), the corresponding score
"measurement", and their relation "has value". The dataset is intended to
support academic and industrial research in the field of medical natural
language processing (NLP).