Detecting Low Back Pain from Clinical Narratives Using Machine Learning Approaches

Free-text clinical notes recorded during the patients’ visits in the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system narrates clinical encounters, often using ‘SOAP’ notes (an acronym for subject, objective, assessment, and plan). The free-text notes represent a wealth of information for discovering insights, particularly in medical conditions such as pain and mental illness, where regular health metrics provide very little knowledge about the patients’ medical situations and reactions to treatments. In this paper, we develop a generic text-mining and decision support framework to diagnose chronic low back pain. The framework utilizes open-source algorithms for anonymization, natural language processing, and machine learning to classify low back pain patterns from unstructured free-text notes in the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system as noted by the primary care physicians during patients’ visits. The initial results show a high accuracy for the limited thirty-four patient labelled data set that we used in this pilot study. We are currently processing a larger data set to test our approach.