Hypothetical
Identifies the spans of text that are the object of a hypothetical statement. For example, a patient’s record may include the statement The doctor discussed the benefits of having an MRI performed. It would be incorrect to say the patient has had an MRI since the sentence indicates the patient and doctor only talked about having an MRI. This statement would be identified as a hypothetical statement. Another example could be the patient's father had diabetes. This isn’t stating the patient has diabetes, just that his father did have it. This is an example of a family history hypothetical span.
The hypothetical annotator makes use of words or phrases called triggers. When a trigger is found in text, the associated phrase is tagged as being a hypothetical span. In the two examples, the trigger terms are discussed and father. Internal to the hypothetical annotator are two dictionaries of these trigger words: hypothetical triggers and family history triggers. Examples from the hypothetical triggers dictionary include suspected, talked about, and scheduled for. Likewise, the internal family history triggers dictionary contains familial terms such as sister, mother, brother, etc.
The hypothetical annotator will add a hypothetical field (true|false) to annotations that are part of a hypothetical span. When hypothetical is true, a hypotheticalType field will also be added to indicate the kind of hypothetical span.
The hypothetical annotator should run after all other annotators to ensure hypothetical fields are created correctly for each annotation.
Annotation Types
- HypotheticalSpan
Configurations
| Configuration | Values | Description |
|---|---|---|
| remove_hypothetical | true/false | When true, any medical concepts deemed hypothetical from the surrounding context will be removed from the API response. When false (default), medical concepts deemed hypothetical will be in the response. |
| include_family_history | true/false | When true, the family history annotations will be included as part of hypothetical spans in the response. When false (default), family history annotations will not be included in the response. For example, his father has diabetes will be annotated and included in the hypothetical span in the response when true. |
HypotheticalSpan
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| begin | The start position of the annotation as a character offset into the text. The smallest possible start position is 0. |
| end | The end position of the annotation as character offset into the text. The end position points at the first character after the annotation, such that end-begin equals the length of the coveredText. |
| coveredText | The text covered by an annotation as a string. |
| type | HypotheticalSpan or FamilyHistorySpan |
| trigger | See trigger feature table below. |
Trigger
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| begin | The start position of the annotation as a character offset into the text. The smallest possible start position is 0. |
| end | The end position of the annotation as character offset into the text. The end position points at the first character after the annotation, such that end-begin equals the length of the coveredText. |
| coveredText | The text that initiated the hypothetical clause. |
| source | The name of the whitelist dictionary in which the trigger resides. The name will be internal if the trigger resides in the internally shipped dictionary. |
Sample Response
Sample response from the hypothetical annotator for the text: We discussed the pros and cons of chemotherapy.
"unstructured": [{"text": "We discussed the pros and cons of chemotherapy.","data": {"concepts": [...{