Monitoring the Epidemiology of Otitis Using Free-Text Pediatric Medical Notes: A Deep Learning Approach

: Free-text information represents a valuable resource for epidemiological surveillance. Its unstructured nature, however, presents significant challenges in the extraction of meaningful information. This study presents a deep learning model for classifying otitis using pediatric medical records. We analyzed the Pedianet database, which includes data from January 2004 to August 2017. The model categorizes narratives from clinical record diagnoses into six types: no otitis, non-media otitis, non-acute otitis media (OM), acute OM (AOM), AOM with perforation, and recurrent AOM. Utilizing deep learning architectures, including an ensemble model, this study addressed the challenges associated with the manual classification of extensive narrative data. The performance of the model was evaluated according to a gold standard classification made by three expert clinicians. The ensemble model achieved values of 97.03, 93.97, 96.59, and 95.48 for balanced precision, balanced recall, accuracy, and balanced F1 measure, respectively. These results underscore the efficacy of using automated systems for medical diagnoses, especially in pediatric care. Our findings demonstrate the potential of deep learning in interpreting complex medical records, enhancing epidemiological surveillance and research. This approach offers significant improvements in handling large-scale medical data, ensuring accuracy and minimizing human error. The methodology is adaptable to other medical contexts, promising a new horizon in healthcare analytics.