Automated Classification of Computer-Based Medical Device Recalls: An Application of Natural Language Processing and Statistical Learning

Abstract

This paper presents MedSafe, a framework for automated classification of computer-based medical device recalls. The data is collected from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recalls database. We combined techniques in natural language processing and statistical learning to automatically identify the computer-related recalls, by interpreting the natural language semantics of recall descriptions. We evaluated MedSafe on over 16K recall records submitted to the FDA between years 2007-2013.