The Development of a Comprehensive Clinicopathologic Registry for Glomerular Diseases Using Natural Language Processing

BACKGROUND: Glomerulonephritis (GN) represents a common cause of chronic kidney disease, and treatment to slow or prevent progression of GN is associated with significant morbidity. Large patient registries have improved the understanding of risk stratification, treatment selection, and definitions of treatment response in GN, but can be resource-intensive, with incomplete patient capture. OBJECTIVE: To describe the creation of a comprehensive clinicopathologic registry for all patients undergoing kidney biopsy in Manitoba, using natural language processing software for data extraction from pathology reports, as well as to describe cohort characteristics and outcomes. DESIGN: Retrospective population-based cohort study. SETTING: Tertiary care center in the province of Manitoba. PATIENTS: All patients undergoing a kidney biopsy in the province of Manitoba from 2002 to 2019. MEASUREMENTS: Descriptive statistics are presented for the most common glomerular diseases, along with outcomes of kidney failure and mortality for the individual diseases. METHODS: Data from native kidney biopsy reports from January 2002 to December 2019 were extracted into a structured database using a natural language processing algorithm employing regular expressions. The pathology database was then linked with population-level clinical, laboratory, and medication data, creating a comprehensive clinicopathologic registry. Kaplan-Meier curves and Cox models were constructed to assess the relationship between type of GN and outcomes of kidney failure and mortality. RESULTS: Of 2421 available biopsies, 2103 individuals were linked to administrative data, of which 1292 had a common glomerular disease. The incidence of yearly biopsies increased almost 3-fold over the study period. Among common glomerular diseases, immunoglobulin A (IgA) nephropathy was the most common (28.6%), whereas infection-related GN had the highest proportions of kidney failure (70.3%) and all-cause mortality (42.3%). Predictors of kidney failure included urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio at the time of biopsy (adjusted hazard ratio [HR] = 1.43, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.24-1.65), whereas predictors of mortality included age at the time of biopsy (adjusted HR = 1.05, 95% CI = 1.04-1.06) and infection-related GN (adjusted HR = 1.85, 95% CI = 1.14-2.99, compared with the reference category of IgA nephropathy). LIMITATIONS: Retrospective, single-center study with a relatively small number of biopsies. CONCLUSIONS: Creation of a comprehensive glomerular diseases registry is feasible and can be facilitated through the use of novel data extraction methods. This registry will facilitate further epidemiological research in GN.