Classifying measurements in dictated, free-text radiology reports

Abstract

Radiological measurements (e.g., '3.2 x 1.4 cm') are the predominant type of quantitative data in free-text radiology reports. We report on the development and evaluation of a classifier that labels measurement descriptors with the exam they refer to: current and/or prior exam. Our classifier aggregates regular expressions as binary features in a maximum entropy model. It has average F-measure 0.942 on 2,000 annotated instances; the rule-based baseline algorithm has F-measure 0.795. Potential applications and routes for future are discussed. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.