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Determining Follow-Up Imaging Study Using Radiology Reports

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Abstract

Radiology reports often contain follow-up imaging recommendations. Failure to comply with these recommendations in a timely manner can lead to delayed treatment, poor patient outcomes, complications, unnecessary testing, lost revenue, and legal liability. The objective of this study was to develop a scalable approach to automatically identify the completion of a follow-up imaging study recommended by a radiologist in a preceding report. We selected imaging-reports containing 559 follow-up imaging recommendations and all subsequent reports from a multi-hospital academic practice. Three radiologists identified appropriate follow-up examinations among the subsequent reports for the same patient, if any, to establish a ground-truth dataset. We then trained an Extremely Randomized Trees that uses recommendation attributes, study meta-data and text similarity of the radiology reports to determine the most likely follow-up examination for a preceding recommendation. Pairwise inter-annotator F-score ranged from 0.853 to 0.868; the corresponding F-score of the classifier in identifying follow-up exams was 0.807. Our study describes a methodology to automatically determine the most likely follow-up exam after a follow-up imaging recommendation. The accuracy of the algorithm suggests that automated methods can be integrated into a follow-up management application to improve adherence to follow-up imaging recommendations. Radiology administrators could use such a system to monitor follow-up compliance rates and proactively send reminders to primary care providers and/or patients to improve adherence.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Clinical Informatics Solutions and Services, Philips Research North America, 2 Canal Park, Cambridge, MA, 02141, USA

    Sandeep Dalal, Vadiraj Hombal & Gabe Mankovich

  2. Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, 10 Shattuck Street, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Wei-Hung Weng

  3. Radiology Solutions, Philips Healthcare, 22100 Bothell Everett Highway, Bothell, WA, 98021, USA

    Thusitha Mabotuwana & Christopher S. Hall

  4. Department of Radiology, University of Washington, 1959 NE Pacific Street, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA

    Joseph Fuller III, Bruce E. Lehnert & Martin L. Gunn

Authors
  1. Sandeep Dalal
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  2. Vadiraj Hombal
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  3. Wei-Hung Weng
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  4. Gabe Mankovich
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  5. Thusitha Mabotuwana
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  6. Christopher S. Hall
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  7. Joseph Fuller III
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  8. Bruce E. Lehnert
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  9. Martin L. Gunn
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Correspondence to Vadiraj Hombal.

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Conflicts of Interest

Authors TM, VH, SD, and CH are employees of Philips working in collaboration with the University of Washington, Department of Radiology under an industry-supported master research agreement. This manuscript details original research performed under this agreement in compliance with the Sunshine Act, but does not employ an existing Philips product. Authors TM and CH also have Adjunct Faculty Appointments with the University of Washington.

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Dalal, S., Hombal, V., Weng, WH. et al. Determining Follow-Up Imaging Study Using Radiology Reports. J Digit Imaging 33, 121–130 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-019-00260-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-019-00260-w

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