Farah Brink, MD is an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Core Faculty at the Center for Injury Research and Policy at the Abigail Wexner Research Institute. She applied for a Spark Award to support her project “Harnessing the Power of Natural Language Processing to Identify Child Abuse.”
“The overall goal of my project is to improve early recognition of physical abuse in young children presenting to an emergency department with concerning injuries,” says Brink. “Missed physical abuse occurs commonly, with up to 30% of young children who suffer serious abusive injuries previously evaluated for injuries that were not recognized as abusive. At the same time, some minoritized populations are more likely to undergo evaluation for abusive injury and a child protective services report even when presenting with accidental injuries. This project addresses both missed abuse and inequities in evaluation.”
Brink’s pilot study applies natural language processing (NLP) to clinical notes within the electronic health record to identify key terms and phrases that improve accuracy in identifying abused patients. “We developed an end-to-end learning NLP model using ModernBERT and 5-fold cross validation to predict a binary label for physical abuse concern,” she explains. “Our model performed well with an AUC-ROC of 0.916. Next, we will compare this model to one that combines structured and unstructured note text with billing codes associated with high-risk injuries.”
Funding from the Spark Award will support completion of this pilot and inform future grant applications aimed at developing clinical decision support embedded within the electronic health record to alert providers of possible physical abuse in real time, leading to earlier identification and intervention. The award also supports services provided by Dr. Joseph Sirrianni, a data analyst in the Information Technology Research & Innovation division of the Abigail Wexner Research Institute.
Congratulations to Farah on receiving a Spark Award and using it to advance innovative tools for child safety.
Julie Johnson, PharmD, is the Director and Principal Investigator at The Ohio State University Clinical and Translational Science Institute.