HTNSystem: Hypertension information extraction system for unstructured clinical notes

Abstract

Hypertension (HTN) relevant information has great application potential in cohort discovery and building predictive models for prevention and surveillance. Unfortunately most of this valuable patient information is buried in the form of unstructured clinical notes. In this study we present HTN information extraction system called HTNSystem which is capable of extracting mentions of HTN and inferring HTN from BP lab values. HTNSystem is a rule based system which implements MetaMap as a core component together with custom built BP value extractor and post processing components. It is evaluated on a corpus of 514 clinical notes (82.92% F-measure). HTNSystem is distributed as an open source command line tool available at https://github.com/TCRNBioinformatics/HTNSystem.