1. Text Mining on Free-Text Based Anatomic Pathology Information Systems: A Front-End Data Integration Approach Zhuang Zuo, MD, PhD Carole W. Boudreaux, MD Department of Pathology University of South Alabama College of Medicine, Mobile, AL (zzuo@usouthal.edu)

2. The Needs To find cases by searching pathology report database using free-text keywords: Research: case series Education: conferences QA/QC Correlations among services And more

3. Limitations of Current LIS Cerner Classic Proprietary database Pathology reports stored as free-text Not support free-text search SNOMED search blocked Bandwidth near saturated

5. Design Relational database Front-end data integration Automatic data extraction Free-text search in multiple fields Support Boolean search No change to current LIS HIPAA compliance

6. Technology Cerner Classic LIS WRQ Reflection 2 terminal emulation software with VBScript Microsoft SQL Server, Access Microsoft Visual Basic

7. LIS Data Extraction Data Cleaning Data Integration PC Data Mining GUI SQL Query Interface

8. save the result as an html file A sample search Module switch panel search within previous result navigat e history search results get all reports of a matched patient A sample HTML output

9. Results 377,172 anatomic pathology reports 198,187 unique medical record numbers cytopathology (51.6%) surgical pathology (40.3%) dermatopathology (6.3%) hematopathology (1%)neuropathology (0.3%) autopsy (0.5%)

10. Results Searches using diagnosis and/or protocol keywords in combination with general case information tested on a PC –results returned almost instantly. –search results were thorough, specific, and significantly faster and of higher quality than SNOMED searches on Cerner LIS. Data mining performed on 228 pediatric autopsy reports produced high quality results. Ongoing development: synoptic input, and CoPathPlus migration.

11. Conclusions A relatively simple solution to transform unstructured data into relational data. Extending query capabilities of legacy LIS. Front-end data integration –zero impact to the existing LIS system –functions independently –flexible and easily adaptable across platforms. A potential middleware solution for third part software, data transferring and data mining. Readily scalable: from a Microsoft Access database application to an enterprise database Web application.