High-Performing Systems for Automatically Detecting Hypoglycemic Events from Electronic Health Record Notes (Preprint)

Yonghao Jin, Fei Li, Hong Yu
2019 JMIR Medical Informatics  
Hypoglycemic events are common and potentially dangerous conditions among patients being treated for diabetes. Automatic detection of such events could improve patient care and is valuable in population studies. Electronic health records (EHRs) are valuable resources for the detection of such events. In this study, we aim to develop a deep-learning-based natural language processing (NLP) system to automatically detect hypoglycemic events from EHR notes. Our model is called the High-Performing
more » ... stem for Automatically Detecting Hypoglycemic Events (HYPE). Domain experts reviewed 500 EHR notes of diabetes patients to determine whether each sentence contained a hypoglycemic event or not. We used this annotated corpus to train and evaluate HYPE, the high-performance NLP system for hypoglycemia detection. We built and evaluated both a classical machine learning model (ie, support vector machines [SVMs]) and state-of-the-art neural network models. We found that neural network models outperformed the SVM model. The convolutional neural network (CNN) model yielded the highest performance in a 10-fold cross-validation setting: mean precision=0.96 (SD 0.03), mean recall=0.86 (SD 0.03), and mean F1=0.91 (SD 0.03). Despite the challenges posed by small and highly imbalanced data, our CNN-based HYPE system still achieved a high performance for hypoglycemia detection. HYPE can be used for EHR-based hypoglycemia surveillance and population studies in diabetes patients.
doi:10.2196/14340 pmid:31702562 pmcid:PMC6913754 fatcat:spwbvlqu4jeevdvadphby5yyiu