  Radiology reports are a rich resource for advancing deep learning
applications in medicine by leveraging the large volume of data continuously
being updated, integrated, and shared. However, there are significant
challenges as well, largely due to the ambiguity and subtlety of natural
language. We propose a hybrid strategy that combines semantic-dictionary
mapping and word2vec modeling for creating dense vector embeddings of free-text
radiology reports. Our method leverages the benefits of both
semantic-dictionary mapping as well as unsupervised learning. Using the vector
representation, we automatically classify the radiology reports into three
classes denoting confidence in the diagnosis of intracranial hemorrhage by the
interpreting radiologist. We performed experiments with varying hyperparameter
settings of the word embeddings and a range of different classifiers. Best
performance achieved was a weighted precision of 88% and weighted recall of
90%. Our work offers the potential to leverage unstructured electronic health
record data by allowing direct analysis of narrative clinical notes.
