Extracting Signs and Symptoms of Hypertensive Disorders in Pregnancy from Clinical Notes Using Natural Language Processing.

Purpose: Hypertensive disorders in pregnancy (HDP) affect 16% of births in the United States. In this pilot study, we conducted a preliminary evaluation of natural language processing (NLP) in extracting signs and symptoms (SS) of HDP from clinical notes within electronic health records (EHRs). Meth...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Maternal & Child Health Journal Vol. 30; no. 6; pp. 809 - 820
Autores principales: Scroggins, Jihye Kim, Zhang, Zhihong, Hulchafo, Ismael I., Topaz, Maxim, Barcelona, Veronica
Formato: research tables/charts Journal Article
Publicado: Springer Nature Jun2026
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
fields @attributes:
  recordID: 1
pdfLink:
plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=194640730&site=ehost-live
header:
  @attributes:
    shortDbName: ccm
    uiTerm: 194640730
    longDbName: CINAHL Complete
    uiTag: AN
  controlInfo:
    bkinfo:
    dissinfo:
    jinfo:
      jid:
        10927875
        N9J
      jtl: Maternal & Child Health Journal
      issn: 10927875
      maglogo: N
    pubinfo:
      dt: Jun2026
      vid: 30
      iid: 6
      pid: 237
      pub: Springer Nature
      place: New York, New York
    artinfo:
      ui:
        194640730
        193882685
        194640730
        194640730
        10.1007/s10995-026-04275-y
        194640730
      ppf: 809
      ppct: 11
      formats:
      tig:
        atl: Extracting Signs and Symptoms of Hypertensive Disorders in Pregnancy from Clinical Notes Using Natural Language Processing.
      aug:
        au:
          Scroggins, Jihye Kim
          Zhang, Zhihong
          Hulchafo, Ismael I.
          Topaz, Maxim
          Barcelona, Veronica
        affil: https://ror.org/0130frc33 School of Nursing, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 120 Medical Dr, 27514, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
      sug:
        subj:
          Information Retrieval
          Signs and Symptoms
          Pregnancy-Induced Hypertension Diagnosis
          Electronic Health Records
          Natural Language Processing Utilization
          Human
          Female
          Adult
          Pregnancy
          United States
          Retrospective Design
          Record Review
          Nonexperimental Studies
          Pilot Studies
          Urban Areas
          Hospitals
          Pre-Eclampsia Diagnosis
          Pregnancy Complications, Cardiovascular Diagnosis
          Machine Learning Algorithms
          Support Vector Machine
          Random Forest
          Decision Trees
          Logistic Regression
          Sensitivity and Specificity
          Reproducibility of Results
          Health Status Disparities
          Bivariate Statistics
          Chi Square Test
          Data Analysis Software
          Descriptive Statistics
          Funding Source
          Adult: 19-44 years
          Female
      ab: Purpose: Hypertensive disorders in pregnancy (HDP) affect 16% of births in the United States. In this pilot study, we conducted a preliminary evaluation of natural language processing (NLP) in extracting signs and symptoms (SS) of HDP from clinical notes within electronic health records (EHRs). Methods: This retrospective observational pilot study used EHR data from patients admitted for labor and birth (N = 83,003 clinical notes from 17,775 patients). Four SS categories were extracted: elevated blood pressure, neurological, renal, and hepatic/hematologic. Five machine learning models and ClinicalBERT were trained and tested using five-fold cross-validation. The best-performing model was applied to the full dataset. Bivariate analyses were performed to examine (1) differences in HDP diagnoses based on ICD-10 codes (gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, and eclampsia) by SS documentation and (2) differences in SS documentation by patient race and ethnicity. Results: XGBoost demonstrated the highest macro-average F1-score (0.75). Elevated blood pressure showed the highest F1-score (0.87), followed by neurological SS (0.77). In the full dataset, 24.3% of clinical notes and 42.3% of patients had documentation of at least one SS category. A higher proportion of HDP diagnoses was observed with an increased number of SS categories documented (p <.001). A higher proportion of non-Hispanic Black patients had documentation of SS across all categories. Conclusion: NLP can extract SS with moderate accuracy, supporting feasibility for larger-scale extraction. Findings also highlight differences in SS documentation by patient race and ethnicity. Future research is needed to improve NLP performance, including expanding annotated data. Significance: What is Already Known: Hypertensive disorders in pregnancy (HDP) affect approximately 16% of births in the United States. Previous studies have used natural language processing (NLP) to extract signs and symptoms of various health conditions, such as heart failure and cancer. However, it is underused in perinatal populations. What This Study Adds: This pilot study used NLP to extract signs and symptoms of HDP from narrative clinical notes with moderate performance, supporting methodological feasibility for larger-scale extraction. Findings also highlight differences in documentation patterns across racial and ethnic groups. Future research is needed to improve NLP performance, including expanding annotated data.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype:
        research
        tables/charts
        Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
    refInfo:
    holdings:
      @attributes:
        islocal: N