Abstract
An abdominal aortic aneurysm is a problem in which the wall of the artery that supplies blood to the abdomen and lower extremities expands under pressure or balloons outward. Patients must undergo surgery to repair such aneurysm, and there is currently no known indicator of success or failure from this surgery. Our work uses a genetic algorithm to analyze radiology reports from these patients to look for common patterns in the language used as well as common features of both successful and unsuccessful surgieries. The results of the genetic algorithm show that patients with complications or unusual characteristics can be identified from a set of radiology reports without the use of search keywords, clustering, categorization, or ontology. This allows medical researchers to search and identify interesting patient records without the need for explicitly defining what “interesting” patient records are.
