Evidence-based clinical engineering: Health information technology adverse events identification and classification with natural language processing

The primary goal of this project is to create a framework to extract Real-World Evidence to support Health Technology Assessment, Health Technology Management, Evidence-Based Maintenance, and Post Market Surveillance (as outlined in the EU Medical Device Regulation 2017/745) of medical devices using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence. An initial literature review on Spontaneous Reporting System databases, Health Information Technologies (HIT) fault classification, and Natural Language Processing has been conducted, from which it clearly emerges that adverse events related to HIT are increasing over time. The proposed framework uses NLP techniques and Explainable Artificial Intelligence models to automatically identify HIT-related adverse event reports. The designed model employs a pre-trained version of ClinicalBERT that has been fine-tuned and tested on 3,075 adverse event reports extracted from the FDA MAUDE database and manually labelled by experts.