Natural Language Processing for Assessing Quality Indicators in Free-Text Colonoscopy and Pathology Reports: Development and Usability Study

BACKGROUND: Manual data extraction of colonoscopy quality indicators is time and labor intensive. Natural language processing (NLP), a computer-based linguistics technique, can automate the extraction of important clinical information, such as adverse events, from unstructured free-text reports. NLP information extraction can facilitate the optimization of clinical work by helping to improve quality control and patient management. OBJECTIVE: We developed an NLP pipeline to analyze free-text colonoscopy and pathology reports and evaluated its ability to automatically assess adenoma detection rate (ADR), sessile serrated lesion detection rate (SDR), and postcolonoscopy surveillance intervals. METHODS: The NLP tool for extracting colonoscopy quality indicators was developed using a data set of 2000 screening colonoscopy reports from a single health care system, with an associated 1425 pathology reports. The NLP system was then tested on a data set of 1000 colonoscopy reports and its performance was compared with that of 5 human annotators. Additionally, data from 54,562 colonoscopies performed between 2010 and 2019 were analyzed using the NLP pipeline. RESULTS: The NLP pipeline achieved an overall accuracy of 0.99-1.00 for identifying polyp subtypes, 0.99-1.00 for identifying the anatomical location of polyps, and 0.98 for counting the number of neoplastic polyps. The NLP pipeline achieved performance similar to clinical experts for assessing ADR, SDR, and surveillance intervals. NLP analysis of a 10-year colonoscopy data set identified great individual variance in colonoscopy quality indicators among 25 endoscopists. CONCLUSIONS: The NLP pipeline could accurately extract information from colonoscopy and pathology reports and demonstrated clinical efficacy for assessing ADR, SDR, and surveillance intervals in these reports. Implementation of the system enabled automated analysis and feedback on quality indicators, which could motivate endoscopists to improve the quality of their performance and improve clinical decision-making in colorectal cancer screening programs.