Modeling Disease Activity in RA

Karlson et al.,

Discussed the current "standard of care" for disease activity (DAS28) for which there is a straightforward calculation. Can we estimate a highly correlated measure using NLP on the clinical record? This will require extracting temporal relations (e.g. activity AFTER anti-TNF therapy). With regard to the disease activity/state itself, we will start by identifying four states: Remission, Low, Moderate, HIgh (also Indeterminate if the note is unclear or too short) which will first have to be identified by our "gold standard" reviewers and annotations (using Knowtator).

Several machine learning approaches to predicting the DAS28 using NLP were reviewed.