Epilepsy & behavior : E&B
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Epilepsy & behavior : E&B · Dec 2013
Validating a natural language processing tool to exclude psychogenic nonepileptic seizures in electronic medical record-based epilepsy research.
As electronic health record (EHR) systems become more available, they will serve as an important resource for collecting epidemiologic data in epilepsy research. However, since clinicians do not have a systematic method for coding psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES), patients with PNES are often misclassified as having epilepsy, leading to sampling error. This study validates a natural language processing (NLP) tool that uses linguistic information to help identify patients with PNES. ⋯ Our study demonstrates that the YTEX NLP tool and classifier is highly accurate in excluding PNES, diagnosed with VEEG, in EHR systems. The tool may be very valuable in preventing false positive identification of patients with epilepsy in EHR-based epidemiologic research.