Automated Identification of Heart Failure With Reduced Ejection Fraction Using Deep Learning-Based Natural Language Processing

Arash A Nargesi; Philip Adejumo; Lovedeep Singh Dhingra; Benjamin Rosand; Astrid Hengartner; Andreas Coppi; Simon Benigeri; Sounok Sen; Tariq Ahmad; Girish N Nadkarni; Zhenqiu Lin; Faraz S Ahmad; Harlan M Krumholz; Rohan Khera

doi:10.1016/j.jchf.2024.08.012

Automated Identification of Heart Failure With Reduced Ejection Fraction Using Deep Learning-Based Natural Language Processing

JACC Heart Fail. 2024 Oct 9:S2213-1779(24)00618-8. doi: 10.1016/j.jchf.2024.08.012. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Heart and Vascular Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
² Section of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
³ Section of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA; Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE), Yale New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
⁴ Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
⁵ Division of Nephrology, Department of Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York, USA.
⁶ Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE), Yale New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
⁷ Section of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA; Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE), Yale New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut, USA; Department of Health Policy and Management, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, Connecticut, USA; Section of Health Informatics, Department of Biostatistics, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
⁸ Section of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA; Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE), Yale New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. Electronic address: rohan.khera@yale.edu.

PMID: 39453355
DOI: 10.1016/j.jchf.2024.08.012

Abstract

Background: The lack of automated tools for measuring care quality limits the implementation of a national program to assess guideline-directed care in heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF).

Objectives: The authors aimed to automate the identification of patients with HFrEF at hospital discharge, an opportunity to evaluate and improve the quality of care.

Methods: The authors developed a novel deep-learning language model for identifying patients with HFrEF from discharge summaries of hospitalizations with heart failure at Yale New Haven Hospital during 2015 to 2019. HFrEF was defined by left ventricular ejection fraction <40% on antecedent echocardiography. The authors externally validated the model at Northwestern Medicine, community hospitals of Yale, and the MIMIC-III (Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III) database.

Results: A total of 13,251 notes from 5,392 unique individuals (age 73 ± 14 years, 48% women), including 2,487 patients with HFrEF (46.1%), were used for model development (train/held-out: 70%/30%). The model achieved an area under receiver-operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.97 and area under precision recall curve (AUPRC) of 0.97 in detecting HFrEF on the held-out set. The model had high performance in identifying HFrEF with AUROC = 0.94 and AUPRC = 0.91 on 19,242 notes from Northwestern Medicine, AUROC = 0.95 and AUPRC = 0.96 on 139 manually abstracted notes from Yale community hospitals, and AUROC = 0.91 and AUPRC = 0.92 on 146 manually reviewed notes from MIMIC-III. Model-based predictions of HFrEF corresponded to a net reclassification improvement of 60.2 ± 1.9% compared with diagnosis codes (P < 0.001).

Conclusions: The authors developed a language model that identifies HFrEF from clinical notes with high precision and accuracy, representing a key element in automating quality assessment for individuals with HFrEF.

Keywords: deep learning; electronic heart records; heart failure with reduced ejection fraction; longformer; natural language processing.