Indeterminate incidental findings pose a challenge to both the radiologist and the ordering physician as their imaging appearance is potentially harmful but their clinical significance and optimal management is unknown. We seek to determine if it is possible to automate detection of adrenal nodules, an indeterminate incidental finding, on imaging examinations at our institution. Using PRESTO (Pathology-Radiology Enterprise Search tool), a newly developed search engine at our institution that mines dictated radiology reports, we searched for phrases used by attendings to describe incidental adrenal findings. Using these phrases as a guide, we designed a query that can be used with the PRESTO index. The results were refined using a modified version of NegEx to eliminate query terms that have been negated within the report text. In order to validate these findings we used an online random date generator to select two random weeks. We queried our RIS database for all reports created on those dates and manually reviewed each report to check for adrenal incidental findings. This survey produced a ground- truth dataset of reports citing adrenal incidental findings against which to compare query performance. We further reviewed the false positives and negatives identified by our validation study, in an attempt to improve the performance query. This algorithm is an important step towards automating the detection of incidental adrenal nodules on cross sectional imaging at our institution. Subsequently, this query can be combined with electronic medical record data searches to determine the clinical significance of these findings through resultant follow-up.

Date Published: 24 March 2011
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 7967, Medical Imaging 2011: Advanced PACS-based Imaging Informatics and Therapeutic Applications, 79670A (24 March 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.881252

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7967:
Medical Imaging 2011: Advanced PACS-based Imaging Informatics and Therapeutic Applications
William W. Boonn M.D.; Brent J. Liu, Editor(s)