Synergizing Data Imputation and Electronic Health Records for Advancing Prostate Cancer Research: Challenges, and Practical Applications

TL;DR

This paper develops a novel pipeline to extract and integrate structured and unstructured EHR data for prostate cancer, overcoming challenges of data ambiguity and missing entries to facilitate advanced research.

Contribution

It introduces a new method combining NLP and data validation to improve data quality and completeness in prostate cancer EHR datasets.

Findings

Enhanced data extraction accuracy for prostate cancer EHRs

Improved completeness of structured and unstructured data integration

Potential for advancing prostate cancer research using enriched datasets

Abstract

The presence of detailed clinical information in electronic health record (EHR) systems presents promising prospects for enhancing patient care through automated retrieval techniques. Nevertheless, it is widely acknowledged that accessing data within EHRs is hindered by various methodological challenges. Specifically, the clinical notes stored in EHRs are composed in a narrative form, making them prone to ambiguous formulations and highly unstructured data presentations, while structured reports commonly suffer from missing and/or erroneous data entries. This inherent complexity poses significant challenges when attempting automated large-scale medical knowledge extraction tasks, necessitating the application of advanced tools, such as natural language processing (NLP), as well as data audit techniques. This work aims to address these obstacles by creating and validating a novel pipeline designed to extract relevant data pertaining to prostate cancer patients. The objective is to exploit the inherent redundancies available within the integrated structured and unstructured data entries within EHRs in order to generate comprehensive and reliable medical databases, ready to be used in advanced research studies. Additionally, the study explores potential opportunities arising from these data, offering valuable prospects for advancing research in prostate cancer.