BERT for the Processing of Radiological Reports: An Attention-based Natural Language Processing Algorithm

Abstract

We have read with great interest the recently published article entitled “Management of Incidental Thyroid Nodules on Chest CT: Using Natural Language Processing to Assess White Paper Adherence and Track Patient Outcomes” (1). In this article, Short et al. used a natural language processing (NLP) model to identify incidental thyroid nodules meeting criteria for sonographic follow-up. Their algorithm employed the fastText architecture, developed by Facebook in 2017, for word embedding, and a fully connected deep learning network for classification.