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Objective: To develop a system for the automatic classification of pathology reports for Cancer Registry notifications., Method: A two pass approach is proposed to classify whether pathology reports are cancer notifiable or not. The first pass queries pathology HL7 messages for known report types that are received by the Queensland Cancer Registry (QCR), while the second pass aims to analyse the free text reports and identify those that are cancer notifiable. Cancer Registry business rules, natural language processing and symbolic reasoning using the SNOMED CT ontology were adopted in the system., Results: The system was developed on a corpus of 500 histology and cytology reports (with 47% notifiable reports) and evaluated on an independent set of 479 reports (with 52% notifiable reports). RESULTS show that the system can reliably classify cancer notifiable reports with a sensitivity, specificity, and positive predicted value (PPV) of 0.99, 0.95, and 0.95, respectively for the development set, and 0.98, 0.96, and 0.96 for the evaluation set. High sensitivity can be achieved at a slight expense in specificity and PPV., Conclusion: The system demonstrates how medical free-text processing enables the classification of cancer notifiable pathology reports with high reliability for potential use by Cancer Registries and pathology laboratories.

Objective: To develop a system for the automatic classification of Cancer Registry notifications data from free-text pathology reports., Method: The underlying technology used for the extraction of cancer notification items is based on the symbolic rule-based classification methodology, whereby formal semantics are used to reason with the systematised nomenclature of medicine - clinical terms (SNOMED CT) concepts identified in the free text. Business rules for cancer notifications used by Cancer Registry coding staff were also incorporated with the aim to mimic Cancer Registry processes., Results: The system was developed on a corpus of 239 histology and cytology reports (with 60% notifiable reports), and then evaluated on an independent set of 300 reports (with 20% notifiable reports). Results show that the system can reliably classify notifiable reports with 96% and 100% specificity, and achieve an overall accuracy of 82% and 74% for classifying notification items from notifiable reports at a unit record level from the development and evaluation set, respectively., Conclusion: Cancer Registries collect a multitude of data that requires manual review, slowing down the flow of information. Extracting and providing an automatically coded cancer pathology notification for review can lessen the reliance on expert clinical staff, improving the efficiency and availability of cancer information.