How do I restrict medication annotations to a specific document section via IBM Watson Annotator for Clinical Data (ACD) - ibm-watson

Question

I’m using the IBM Watson Annotator for Clinical Data (ACD) API hosted in IBM Cloud to detect medication mentions within discharge summary clinic notes. I’m using the out-of-the-box medication annotator provided with ACD.
I’m able to detect and extract medication mentions, but I ONLY want medications mentioned within “DISCHARGE MEDICATIONS” or “DISCHARGE INSTRUCTIONS” sections.
Is there a way I can restrict ACD to only return medication mentions that appear within those two sections? I’m only interested in discharge medications.
For example, given the following contrived (non-PHI) text:
“Patient was previously prescribed cisplatin.DISCHARGE MEDICATIONS: 1. Aspirin 81 mg orally once daily.”
I get two medication mentions: one over “cisplatin” and another over “aspirin” - I only want the latter, since it appears within the “DISCHARGE MEDICATIONS” section.

Answer 1

Since the ACD medication annotator captures the section headings as part of the mention annotations that appear within a section, you can define an inclusive filter that checks for (1) the desired normalized section heading as well as (2) a filter that checks for the existence of the section heading fields in general, should a mention appear outside of any section and not include section header fields as part of the annotation. This will filter out any medication mentions from the ACD response that don't appear within a "DISCHARGE MEDICATIONS" section. I added a couple other related normalized section headings so you can see how that's done. Feel free to modify the sample below to meet your needs.
Here's a sample flow you can persist via POST /flows and then reference on the analyze call as POST /analyze/{flow_id} - e.g. POST /analyze/discharge_med_flow
{
"id": "discharge_med_flow",
"name": "Disharge Medications Flow",
"description": "Detect medication mentions within DISCHARGE MEDICATIONS sections",
"annotatorFlows": [
{
"flow": {
"elements": [
{
"annotator": {
"name": "medication",
"configurations": [
{
"filter": {
"target": "unstructured.data.MedicationInd",
"condition": {
"type": "all",
"conditions": [
{
"type": "all",
"conditions": [
{
"type": "match",
"field": "sectionNormalizedName",
"values": [
"Discharge medication",
"Discharge instructions",
"Medications on discharge"
],
"not": false,
"caseInsensitive": true,
"operator": "equals"
},
{
"type": "match",
"field": "sectionNormalizedName",
"operator": "fieldExists"
}
]
}
]
}
}
}
]
}
}
],
"async": false
}
}
]
}
See the IBM Watson Annotator for Clinical Data filtering docs for additional details.
Thanks