Extracting Coronary Artery Disease risk factors, results from the i2b2 2014 Challenge
Linguamatics
It was great to see our paper on the i2b2 NLP challenge from last year published recently. The challenge looked at extraction of Coronary Artery Disease risk factors from unstructured patient data provided by the Research Patient Data Repository of Partners Healthcare. Having done previous i2b2 challenges, such as smoking cessation, after the competition had closed, we wanted to actively participate in the 2014 NLP challenge and see how we compared against other NLP groups in the competition. Linguamatics work with many academic medical centers and cancer centers and view collaboration as a key component of our customer relationships. As such, we wanted to share our success or failure with our peers and show how a commercial system can tackle these areas.
The i2b2 training set consisted of 790 annotated documents relating to 178 patients, which we decided to divide into training (70%) and development (30%) sets. The test set contained 514 documents from 118 patients. Contestants were set this task: extract CAD risk factors such as specific diseases (e.g. diabetes), medications, family history of CAD and lab results; also take into account when tests were carried out or whether a disease diagnosis was in the past or current.
Our team’s results were excellent and, at 91.7% Micro F-Score, were competitive with the best system in this challenge. I2E, being a rule based system, was well suited for the challenge compared to machine learning systems because: