Automated Detection of Type of Scoliosis Surgery from Operative Notes Using Natural Language Processing

Scoliosis is an abnormal lateral curvature of the spine and managed surgically in severe cases. There is growing interest in comparing the effectiveness and safety of different surgical options. Yet, the type of surgical procedure is not readily available in a structured format in large databases but resides in the free text of the operative notes, hindering comparative effectiveness studies. In this study, we implemented a high-performance natural language processing (NLP) algorithm to classify 3 types of scoliosis surgery from the free text of operative notes.