I have been investigating how polarity on a sign/symptom gets set and ran into interesting issue. If a physician's note in a history of present illness (HPI) says something like:
“Absence of chest pain.” “Denied chest pain.” “Chest pain resolved.” Then cTAKES picks up the term "chest pain", assigns it the correct SNOMED codes and sets the polarity to -1. However, some of the de-identified samples say: "Chest pain absent." In this case it is also picked up by cTAKES but in this case the polarity is set to positive one (1). I have been trying to figure out if there is a way to configure cTAKES to detect that. Any suggestions?
