Evaluating Report Text Variation and Informativeness: Natural Language Processing of CT Chest Imaging for Pulmonary Embolism

Use of free text reporting was associated with extensive variability in report length and report terms used. Interpretation of the free text was a difficult machine learning task and suggests potential difficulty for human recipients in fully understanding such reports. These results support the prospective assessment of the impact of a fully structured report template with at least some mandatory discrete fields on ease of use of reports and their understanding.