French researchers have developed an algorithm capable of classifying trauma by category, in an attempt to relieve emergency services.
The solution to address the ills affecting emergency services may lie in artificial intelligence. Researchers from Inserm and the University of Bordeaux have developed an algorithm capable of classifying emergency room visits due to trauma through the analysis of clinical reports.
Trauma represents a third of emergency visits and 9% of mortality in France. Trauma can relate to accidents in everyday life or road accidents, but also suicide attempts, for example.
At each visit to the emergency room, caregivers must fill out reports that include a certain amount of information: statement of symptoms, condition of patients or circumstances of the occurrence of the trauma.
From there, the researchers found that this data remained largely untapped. Above all, these reviews are unstructured texts, with technical terms and abbreviations. The researchers’ project is called TARPON (for Automatic Processing of Summaries of Passages to emergencies for a National Observatory), whose the results have been published in the review Journal of Medical Internet Research Artificial Intelligence.
97% correct rankings
And that’s where artificial intelligence comes in. To extract the relevant information from the reports without having to sift through them one by one, the researchers developed an automatic processing technique based on artificial neural networks. The analysis of the information is done anonymously.
The system was trained from a sample of 500,000 reports from adult emergencies at Bordeaux University Hospital. A powerful server, installed in the hospital, makes it possible to implement the algorithm and thus classify injuries according to their type.
Result: 97% of reports are classified correctly thanks to this algorithm. This work will allow the establishment of a national trauma surveillance system, but also for epidemiological analyses.
As of this summer, the study of the data will be able to begin on the technological platform of the Health Data Hub. The project will be extended to about fifteen emergency services in France.
