Natural Language Processing Systems for Diagnosing and Determining Level of Lung Cancer: A Systematic Review

Introduction: Lung cancer is the second most common cancer for men and women. Using natural language processing to automatically extract information from text, lead to decrease labor of manual extraction from large volume of text material and save time. The aim of this study is to systematically review of studies which reviewed NLP methods in diagnosing and staging lung cancer.Material and Methods: PubMed, Scopus, Web of science, Embase was searched for English language articles that reported diagnosing and staging methods in lung cancer Using NLP until DEC 2019. Two reviewers independently assessed original papers to determine eligibility for inclusion in the review.Results: Of 119 studies, 7 studies were included. Three studies developed a NLP algorithm to scan radiology notes and determine the presence or absence of nodules to identify patients with incident lung nodules for treatment or follow-up. Two studies used NLP to transform the report text, including identification of UMLS terms and detection of negated findings to classifying reports, also one of them used an SVM-based text classification system for staging lung cancer patients. All studies reported various performance measures based on the difference between combination of methods. Most of studies have reported sensitivity and specificity of the NLP algorithm for identifying the presence of lung nodules.Conclusion: Evaluation of studies in diagnosing and staging methods in lung cancer using NLP shows there is a number of studies on diagnosing lung cancer but there are a few works on staging that. In some studies, combination of methods was considered and NLP isolated was not sufficient for capturing satisfying results. There are potentials to improve studies by adding other data sources, further refinement and subsequent validation.