Extracting Physical Rehabilitation Exercise Information from Clinical Notes: a Comparison of Rule-Based and Machine Learning Natural Language Processing Techniques

Physical rehabilitation plays a crucial role in the recovery process of post-stroke patients. By personalizing therapies for patients leveraging predictive modeling and electronic health records (EHRs), healthcare providers can make the rehabilitation process more efficient. Before predictive modeling can provide decision support for the assignment of treatment plans, automated methods are necessary to extract physical rehabilitation exercise information from unstructured EHRs. We introduce a rule-based natural language processing algorithm to annotate therapeutic procedures for stroke patients and compare it to several small machine learning models. We find that our algorithm outperforms these models in extracting half of the concepts where sufficient data is available, and individual exercise descriptions can be assigned binary labels with an f-score of no less than 0.75 per concept. More research needs to be done before these algorithms can be deployed on unlabeled documents, but current progress gives promise to the potential of precision rehabilitation research.