Machine Learning–Based Text Analysis to Predict Severely Injured Patients in Emergency Medical Dispatch: Model Development and Validation

BACKGROUND: Early recognition of severely injured patients in prehospital settings is of paramount importance for timely treatment and transportation of patients to further treatment facilities. The dispatching accuracy has seldom been addressed in previous studies. OBJECTIVE: In this study, we aimed to build a machine learning–based model through text mining of emergency calls for the automated identification of severely injured patients after a road accident. METHODS: Audio recordings of road accidents in Taipei City, Taiwan, in 2018 were obtained and randomly sampled. Data on call transfers or non-Mandarin speeches were excluded. To predict cases of severe trauma identified on-site by emergency medical technicians, all included cases were evaluated by both humans (6 dispatchers) and a machine learning model, that is, a prehospital-activated major trauma (PAMT) model. The PAMT model was developed using term frequency–inverse document frequency, rule-based classification, and a Bernoulli naïve Bayes classifier. Repeated random subsampling cross-validation was applied to evaluate the robustness of the model. The prediction performance of dispatchers and the PAMT model, in severe cases, was compared. Performance was indicated by sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and accuracy. RESULTS: Although the mean sensitivity and negative predictive value obtained by the PAMT model were higher than those of dispatchers, they obtained higher mean specificity, positive predictive value, and accuracy. The mean accuracy of the PAMT model, from certainty level 0 (lowest certainty) to level 6 (highest certainty), was higher except for levels 5 and 6. The overall performances of the dispatchers and the PAMT model were similar; however, the PAMT model had higher accuracy in cases where the dispatchers were less certain of their judgments. CONCLUSIONS: A machine learning–based model, called the PAMT model, was developed to predict severe road accident trauma. The results of our study suggest that the accuracy of the PAMT model is not superior to that of the participating dispatchers; however, it may assist dispatchers when they lack confidence while making a judgment.