ArticleStroke (Hoboken, N.J.)2025
Natural Language Processing to Automate Cerebrovascular Event Identification in Stroke Alerts.
Article in Stroke (Hoboken, N.J.), 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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9 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundFrequent false-positive stroke alerts can strain health resources. Machine learning models can predict stroke alert accuracy and potentially reduce this strain, but these models require time-consuming labeling of large data sets. Weak labeling can accelerate machine learning model development by assigning annotations based on expert-defined heuristic rules rather than manual review. We sought to label a large, unlabeled sample of stroke alerts according to a binary outcome (presence/absence of acute cerebrovascular disease) using weak labeling.
methodsWe developed a weak labeling heuristic ensemble consisting of 4 hierarchical tiers, each of which generated a binary label using custom labeling algorithms. Tier 1 used rule-based named-entity recognition to generate binary labels from brain radiology reports. Tier 2 aggregated Tier 1 outputs over a 48-hour window. Tier 3 determined labels using diagnosis codes from stroke alert hospital encounters. Tier 4 generated a "final" encounter-level label based on label output combinations of Tiers 2 and 3. In 3 separate samples of stroke alerts, we determined sensitivity, specificity, and F1 scores of Tiers 1, 2, 3, and 4 by comparing Tier outputs to manual chart review.
resultsWe identified 16 512 stroke alert activations between 2011 and 2021. For Tier 1, performance metrics were based on an initial manual review of 300 neuroimaging reports, achieving a sensitivity of 0.84, specificity of 0.96, and an F1 of 0.87. Tier 2 incorporated 716 neuroimaging reports with a sensitivity of 0.93, specificity of 0.90, and an F1 of 0.91. Tiers 3 and 4 were validated against 250 encounters. Tier 3 achieved a sensitivity of 0.77, specificity of 0.89, and an F1 of 0.80. Tier 4 achieved a sensitivity of 0.92, specificity of 0.86, and an F1 of 0.87.
conclusionsWe successfully labeled a large registry of stroke alerts using weak labeling. This framework can potentially be extended to other clinical data sets.
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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.