Use of emergency department electronic medical records for automated epidemiological surveillance of suicide attempts: a French pilot study.

The aim of this study was to determine whether an expert system based on automated processing of electronic health records (EHRs) could provide a more accurate estimate of the annual rate of emergency department (ED) visits for suicide attempts in France, as compared to the current national surveillance system based on manual coding by emergency practitioners. A feasibility study was conducted at Lyon University Hospital, using data for all ED patient visits in 2012. After automatic data extraction and pre-processing, including automatic coding of medical free-text through use of the Unified Medical Language System, seven different machine-learning methods were used to classify the reasons for ED visits into "suicide attempts" versus "other reasons". The performance of these different methods was compared by using the F-measure. In a test sample of 444 patients admitted to the ED in 2012 (98 suicide attempts, 48 cases of suicidal ideation, and 292 controls with no recorded non-fatal suicidal behaviour), the F-measure for automatic detection of suicide attempts ranged from 70.4% to 95.3%. The random forest and naïve Bayes methods performed best. This study demonstrates that machine-learning methods can improve the quality of epidemiological indicators as compared to current national surveillance of suicide attempts.

Annotation methods to develop and evaluate an expert system based on natural language processing in electronic medical records.

The objective of the SYNODOS collaborative project was to develop a generic IT solution, combining a medical terminology server, a semantic analyser and a knowledge base. The goal of the project was to generate meaningful epidemiological data for various medical domains from the textual content of French medical records. In the context of this project, we built a care pathway oriented conceptual model and corresponding annotation method to develop and evaluate an expert system's knowledge base. The annotation method is based on a semi-automatic process, using a software application (MedIndex). This application exchanges with a cross-lingual multi-termino-ontology portal. The annotator selects the most appropriate medical code proposed for the medical concept in question by the multi-termino-ontology portal and temporally labels the medical concept according to the course of the medical event. This choice of conceptual model and annotation method aims to create a generic database of facts for the secondary use of electronic health records data.