ArticleMayo Clinic proceedings. Digital health2024
Thyroid Ultrasound Appropriateness Identification Through Natural Language Processing of Electronic Health Records.
Article in Mayo Clinic proceedings. Digital health, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Precision medicine in thyroid nodules: current strategies, challenges, and future directions.Hormones (Athens, Greece) · 2026Review
- From explainability to clinical actionability: translating artificial intelligence models into decision support for endocrine disease management.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2026Review
- Evaluating the Total Healthcare Cost of Inappropriately Ordered Thyroid Ultrasounds.Journal of the Endocrine Society · 2025Article
- RADEX: a rule-based clinical and radiology data extraction tool demonstrated on thyroid ultrasound reports.European radiology · 2025Article
- Time to de-implementation of low-value cancer screening practices: a narrative review.BMJ quality & safety · 2025Review
- Use of Natural Language Processing to Extract and Classify Papillary Thyroid Cancer Features From Surgical Pathology Reports.Endocrine practice : official journal of the American College of Endocrinology and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Objective: To address thyroid cancer overdiagnosis, we aim to develop a natural language processing (NLP) algorithm to determine the appropriateness of thyroid ultrasounds (TUS). Patients and Methods: Between 2017 and 2021, we identified 18,000 TUS patients at Mayo Clinic and selected 628 for chart review to create a ground truth dataset based on consensus. We developed a rule-based NLP pipeline to identify TUS as appropriate TUS (aTUS) or inappropriate TUS (iTUS) using patients' clinical notes and additional meta information. In addition, we designed an abbreviated NLP pipeline (aNLP) solely focusing on labels from TUS order requisitions to facilitate deployment at other health care systems. Our dataset was split into a training set of 468 (75%) and a test set of 160 (25%), using the former for rule development and the latter for performance evaluation. Results: There were 449 (95.9%) patients identified as aTUS and 19 (4.06%) as iTUS in the training set; there are 155 (96.88%) patients identified as aTUS and 5 (3.12%) were iTUS in the test set. In the training set, the pipeline achieved a sensitivity of 0.99, specificity of 0.95, and positive predictive value of 1.0 for detecting aTUS. The testing cohort revealed a sensitivity of 0.96, specificity of 0.80, and positive predictive value of 0.99. Similar performance metrics were observed in the aNLP pipeline. Conclusion: The NLP models can accurately identify the appropriateness of a thyroid ultrasound from clinical documentation and order requisition information, a critical initial step toward evaluating the drivers and outcomes of TUS use and subsequent thyroid cancer overdiagnosis.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.