Natural language processing helps hospital predict downstream demand for imaging services

The authors said an automated method for predicting future imaging resource utilization could help streamline the process, paving the way for capacity management strategies that could help meet the increased but unpredictable demand for radiology services. Using data from all hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) surveillance CT exams performed at their hospital between 2010 and 2017, they used open-source NLP and machine learning software to parse free-text radiology reports into bag-of-words and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) models. In NLP, bag-of-words refers to the frequency with which words occur in a report summary, while TF-IDF considers the number of times a word appears in the summary and measures the uniqueness of specific terms in the context of entire report collections. Brown and Kachura also used three machine learning techniques--logistic regression, support vector machine (SVM) and random forest--to make their predictions. As a whole, the authors found bag-of-words models were somewhat inferior to the TF-IDF approach, with the TF-IDF and SVM combination yielding the most favorable results.