A knowledge-based, automated method for phenotyping in the EHR using only clinical pathology reports

The secondary use of electronic health records (EHR) represents unprecedented opportunities for biomedical discovery. Central to this goal is, EHR-phenotyping, also known as cohort identification, which remains a significant challenge. Complex phenotypes often require multivariate and multi-scale analyses, ultimately leading to manually created phenotype definitions. We present Ontology-driven Reports-based Phenotyping from Unique Signatures (ORPheUS), an automated approach to EHR-phenotyping. To do this we identify unique signatures of abnormal clinical pathology reports that correspond to pre-defined medical terms from biomedical ontologies. By using only the clinical pathology, or “lab”, reports we are able to mitigate clinical biases enabling researchers to explore other dimensions of the EHR. We used ORPheUS to generate signatures for 858 diseases and validated against reference cohorts for Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) and Atrial Fibrillation (AF). Our results suggest that our approach, using solely clinical pathology reports, is an effective as a primary screening tool for automated clinical phenotyping.