Automated interpretation of stress echocardiography reports using natural language processing

Cardiologists had good agreements on the overall SE results on the 140 reports: Kappa (0.83) and intraclass correlation coefficient (0.89). The NLP algorithm achieved 98.6% specificity and negative predictive value, 95.7% sensitivity, positive predictive value and F-score on the overall SE results and near-perfect scores on ischemia findings. The 30-day acute myocardial infarction or death outcomes were highest among patients with ischemia (5.0%), followed by infarction (1.4%), non-diagnostic (0.8%) and normal (0.3%) results. We found substantial variations in the format and quality of SE reports, even within the same institution.