Identifying Mentions of Pain in Mental Health Records Text: A Natural Language Processing Approach
This work addresses the extraction of pain information from mental health records for researchers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset.
The researchers tackled the problem of identifying pain mentions in mental health records text by training a machine learning classification algorithm, achieving an F1-score of 0.98.
Pain is a common reason for accessing healthcare resources and is a growing area of research, especially in its overlap with mental health. Mental health electronic health records are a good data source to study this overlap. However, much information on pain is held in the free text of these records, where mentions of pain present a unique natural language processing problem due to its ambiguous nature. This project uses data from an anonymised mental health electronic health records database. The data are used to train a machine learning based classification algorithm to classify sentences as discussing patient pain or not. This will facilitate the extraction of relevant pain information from large databases, and the use of such outputs for further studies on pain and mental health. 1,985 documents were manually triple-annotated for creation of gold standard training data, which was used to train three commonly used classification algorithms. The best performing model achieved an F1-score of 0.98 (95% CI 0.98-0.99).