Ozlem Uzuner, Associate Professor and Interim Chair, Information Sciences and Technology, received $222,469 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for a large-scale clinical and economic impact analysis of potentially malignant incidental findings in radiology reports.
Uzuner and her team will contribute to two aims of this project: (1) Extraction of incidentaloma frame information from clinical narratives, and (2) Creation of an incidentaloma database for economic analysis of incidentalomas.
In the first aim, the team will build on their experience in extracting structured information from unstructured narratives. The researchers will study methods for accurately extracting follow-up recommendations as well as recommendation reason and time frame from clinical records. They will also work closely with the team at the University of Washington on identifying tumor information and populating tumor-finding frames.
For the second aim, they will build on their past work on relative and incomplete time expression normalization as well as mapping clinical concepts to unified medical language system (UMLS) ontologies in order to build state-of-the-art systems. As in the first aim, the Mason team will work closely with the University of Washington team on this aim.
“Many potentially malignant incidental findings are lost to inadequate follow-up and can lead to devastating health outcomes. At the same time, some other incidental findings may lead to over-follow-up and lead to co-morbidities. Identifying the incidental findings, and assessing their risk and their need for follow up can help us optimize health outcomes. Our goal is to learn from retrospective data about the rate of incidental findings, the rate of their effective follow up, and the outcomes when they are and they are not followed up so that we can be more deliberate about the implementation of workflows that alert the caregivers to follow up on the right incidental findings,” Uzuner said.
Funding for this project began in April 2021 and will end in late February 2025.
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About George Mason University
George Mason University is Virginia’s largest public research university. Located near Washington, D.C., Mason enrolls 38,000 students from 130 countries and all 50 states. Mason has grown rapidly over the last half-century and is recognized for its innovation and entrepreneurship, remarkable diversity and commitment to accessibility. Learn more at http://www.
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