Pro-WATCH (protecting war fighters using algorithms for text processing to capture health events), a syndromic surveillance project for veterans of operation enduring freedom (OEF)/operation Iraqi freedom (OIF), includes a task to identify medically unexplained symptoms (MUS). The v3NLP entity extraction tool is being customized to identify symptoms within VA clinical documents, and then refined to assign duration. The identification of medically unexplained symptoms and the aggregation of this information across documents by patient’s is not addressed here.
Objective
Pro-WATCH (protecting war fighters using algorithms for text processing to capture health events), a syndromic surveillance project, includes a task to identify medically unexplained symptoms. The v3NLP entity extraction tool is being customized to identify symptoms, then to assign duration assertions to address part of this project. The v3NLP tool was recently enhanced to find problems, treatments, and tests for the i2b2/VA challenge. The problem capability is being further refined to find symptoms. Machine learning models will be developed using an annotated corpus currently in development to find duration assertions.