Extracting information from free text through unsupervised graph-based clustering: an application to patient incident records
This work addresses the challenge of analyzing free text in healthcare records for medical personnel, offering an incremental improvement through a novel combination of existing techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of underused text in electronic healthcare records by developing an unsupervised graph-based clustering method to extract interpretable content from patient incident reports, achieving high textual consistency and competitive performance against hand-coded categories.
The large volume of text in electronic healthcare records often remains underused due to a lack of methodologies to extract interpretable content. Here we present an unsupervised framework for the analysis of free text that combines text-embedding with paragraph vectors and graph-theoretical multiscale community detection. We analyse text from a corpus of patient incident reports from the National Health Service in England to find content-based clusters of reports in an unsupervised manner and at different levels of resolution. Our unsupervised method extracts groups with high intrinsic textual consistency and compares well against categories hand-coded by healthcare personnel. We also show how to use our content-driven clusters to improve the supervised prediction of the degree of harm of the incident based on the text of the report. Finally, we discuss future directions to monitor reports over time, and to detect emerging trends outside pre-existing categories.