Automated NLP Extraction of Clinical Rationale for Treatment Discontinuation in Breast Cancer

PURPOSE Key oncology end points are not routinely encoded into electronic medical records (EMRs). We assessed whether natural language processing (NLP) can abstract treatment discontinuation rationale from unstructured EMR notes to estimate toxicity incidence and progression-free survival (PFS). METHODS We constructed a retrospective cohort of 6,115 patients with early-stage and 701 patients with metastatic breast cancer initiating care at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center from 2008 to 2019. Each cohort was divided into training (70%), validation (15%), and test (15%) subsets. Human abstractors identified the clinical rationale associated with treatment discontinuation events. Concatenated EMR notes were used to train high-dimensional logistic regression and convolutional neural network models. Kaplan-Meier analyses were used to compare toxicity incidence and PFS estimated by our NLP models to estimates generated by manual labeling and time-to-treatment discontinuation (TTD). RESULTS Our best high-dimensional logistic regression models identified toxicity events in early-stage patients with an area under the curve of the receiver-operator characteristic of 0.857 +/- 0.014 (standard deviation) and progression events in metastatic patients with an area under the curve of 0.752 +/- 0.027 (standard deviation). NLP-extracted toxicity incidence and PFS curves were not significantly different from manually extracted curves (P = .95 and P = .67, respectively). By contrast, TTD overestimated toxicity in early-stage patients (P < .001) and underestimated PFS in metastatic patients (P < .001). Additionally, we tested an extrapolation approach in which 20% of the metastatic cohort were labeled manually, and NLP algorithms were used to abstract the remaining 80%. This extrapolated outcomes approach resolved PFS differences between receptor subtypes (P < .001 for hormone receptor+/human epidermal growth factor receptor 2- v human epidermal growth factor receptor 2+ v triple-negative) that could not be resolved with TTD. CONCLUSION NLP models are capable of abstracting treatment discontinuation rationale with minimal manual labeling.