Mass General Uses Machine Learning in EHR to Detect Alzheimer’s

December 24, 2019 - Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) are utilizing machine learning and natural language processing tools in their EHRs to diagnose the chance that a patient will eventually receive a dementia or Alzheimer’s diagnosis, according to a new report.

Members of MGH’s Center for Quantitative Health, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Publish Health, and the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center developed an algorithm based on machine learning to first build a list of key clinical terms associated with cognitive symptoms identified by clinical experts.

After creating the algorithm, the scientists used national language processing (NLP) to find those clinical terms within the EHR. Once that task was completed, researchers took the data and estimated the chances that the patient would develop dementia.