Incidental pulmonary nodules: Natural language processing analysis of radiology reports.

Background: Pulmonary nodules are a common incidental finding on chest Computed Tomography scans (CT), most of the time outside of lung cancer screening (LCS). We aimed to evaluate the number of incidental pulmonary nodules (IPN) found in 1 year in our hospital, as well as the follow-up (FUP) rate and the clinical and radiological features associated with FUP.

Methods: We trained a Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool to identify the transcripts mentioning the presence of a pulmonary nodule, among a large population of patients from a French hospital.

Palliative care referral and associated outcomes among patients with cancer in the last 2 weeks of life.

Background: Palliative care (PC) improves the quality of life of patients with advanced cancer. Our aim was to describe PC referral among patients with advanced cancer, and associated outcomes in an academic medical centre.

Methods: We reviewed the medical records of 536 inpatients with cancer who had died in 2010.