A system for de-identifying medical message board text

BMC Bioinformatics

Research

Lyle Ungar¹  John H Holmes²  Charles Leonard²  Annie Chung²  Cristin Freeman²  Adrian Benton²  Shawndra Hill³ 

[1] University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science, Philadelphia, PA, U.S;University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, U.S;University of Pennsylvania, The Wharton School, Philadelphia, PA, U.S;

关键词: Word List;    Name Entity Recognition;    Entity Recognition;    Message Board;    Doxy;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2105-12-S3-S2

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

There are millions of public posts to medical message boards by users seeking support and information on a wide range of medical conditions. It has been shown that these posts can be used to gain a greater understanding of patients’ experiences and concerns. As investigators continue to explore large corpora of medical discussion board data for research purposes, protecting the privacy of the members of these online communities becomes an important challenge that needs to be met. Extant entity recognition methods used for more structured text are not sufficient because message posts present additional challenges: the posts contain many typographical errors, larger variety of possible names, terms and abbreviations specific to Internet posts or a particular message board, and mentions of the authors’ personal lives. The main contribution of this paper is a system to de-identify the authors of message board posts automatically, taking into account the aforementioned challenges. We demonstrate our system on two different message board corpora, one on breast cancer and another on arthritis. We show that our approach significantly outperforms other publicly available named entity recognition and de-identification systems, which have been tuned for more structured text like operative reports, pathology reports, discharge summaries, or newswire.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Benton et al. 2011