SODA: A Natural Language Processing Package to Extract Social Determinants of Health for Cancer Studies

Objective: We aim to develop an open-source natural language processing (NLP) package, SODA (i.e., SOcial DeterminAnts), with pre-trained transformer models to extract social determinants of health (SDoH) for cancer patients, examine the generalizability of SODA to a new disease domain (i.e., opioid use), and evaluate the extraction rate of SDoH using cancer populations. Methods: We identified SDoH categories and attributes and developed an SDoH corpus using clinical notes from a general cancer cohort. We compared four transformer-based NLP models to extract SDoH, examined the generalizability of NLP models to a cohort of patients prescribed with opioids, and explored customization strategies to improve performance. We applied the best NLP model to extract 19 categories of SDoH from the breast (n=7,971), lung (n=11,804), and colorectal cancer (n=6,240) cohorts. Results and Conclusion: We developed a corpus of 629 cancer patients notes with annotations of 13,193 SDoH concepts/attributes from 19 categories of SDoH. The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model achieved the best strict/lenient F1 scores of 0.9216 and 0.9441 for SDoH concept extraction, 0.9617 and 0.9626 for linking attributes to SDoH concepts. Fine-tuning the NLP models using new annotations from opioid use patients improved the strict/lenient F1 scores from 0.8172/0.8502 to 0.8312/0.8679. The extraction rates among 19 categories of SDoH varied greatly, where 10 SDoH could be extracted from>70% of cancer patients, but 9 SDoH had a low extraction rate (<70% of cancer patients). The SODA package with pre-trained transformer models is publicly available at https://github.com/uf-hobiinformatics-lab/SDoH_SODA.