Detection of muscle weakness in medical texts using natural language processing

Identifying adverse events in clinical documents is demanded in retrospective clinical research and prospective monitoring of treatment safety and cost-effectiveness. We proposed and evaluated a few methods of semi-automated muscle weakness detection in preoperative clinical notes for a larger project on predicting paresis by images. The combination of semi-expert and machine learning methods demonstrated maximized sensitivity = 0.860 and specificity = 0.919, and largest AUC = 0.943 with a 95% CI [0.874; 0.991], outperforming each method used individually. Our approaches are expected to be effective for autoshaping a well- verified training dataset for supervised machine learning.