Extraction and Imputation of Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group Performance Status From Unstructured Oncology Notes Using Language Models.

Purpose: Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) performance status (PS) is a key clinical variable for cancer treatment and research, but it is usually only recorded in unstructured form in the electronic health record. We investigated whether natural language processing (NLP) models can impute ECOG PS using unstructured note text.

Materials And Methods: Medical oncology notes were identified from all patients with cancer at our center from 1997 to 2023 and divided at the patient level into training (approximately 80%), tuning/validation (approximately 10%), and test (approximately 10%) sets.