Can Patients with Dementia Be Identified in Primary Care Electronic Medical Records Using Natural Language Processing?

ABSTRACT: Dementia and mild cognitive impairment can be underrecognized in primary care practice and research. Free-text fields in electronic medical records (EMRs) are a rich source of information which might support increased detection and enable a better understanding of populations at risk of dementia. We used natural language processing (NLP) to identify dementia-related features in EMRs and compared the performance of supervised machine learning models to classify patients with dementia. We assembled a cohort of primary care patients aged 66 + years in Ontario, Canada, from EMR notes collected until December 2016: 526 with dementia and 44,148 without dementia. We identified dementia-related features by applying published lists, clinician input, and NLP with word embeddings to free-text progres

SUBMITTER: Maclagan LC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9995630 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature