Rapid trauma classification under data scarcity: an emergency on-scene decision model combining natural language processing and machine learning.

Abstract

Trauma has become a major cause of increased morbidity and mortality worldwide. In emergency response, the classification of injuries is crucial as it helps to quickly determine the criticality of the injured, allocate rescue resources rationally, and decide the priority order of treatment. However, emergency scenes are often chaotic environments, making it difficult for rescue personnel to collect complete and accurate information about the injured in a short period. The combination of artificial intelligence and emergency rescue is gradually changing the rescue model, improving the efficiency of rescue operations. We selected data from 26,810 trauma patients admitted to Chongqing Daping Hospital between 2013 and 2024. We propose a fast tiered medical treatment method with a two-layer structure under emergency limited data conditions, which integrates natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques. The tiered medical treatment model utilizes NLP to capture semantic features of unstructured text data, while utilizing four ML algorithms to process structured numerical data. Additionally, we conducted external validation using 245 data entries from the Chongqing Emergency Center. The experimental results show that gradient boosting and logistic regression have the best performance in the two-layer ML algorithms. Based on these two algorithms, our model outperformed the multilayer perceptron (MLP) model on the test dataset, achieving an accuracy of 91.17%, which is 4.33% higher than that of the MLP model. The specificity, F1-score, and AUC of our model were 97.06%, 86.85%, and 0.949, respectively. For the external dataset, the model achieved accuracy, specificity, F1-score, and AUC of 87.35%, 95.78%, 80.37%, and 0.848, respectively. These results demonstrate the model's high generalizability and prediction accuracy. A model integrating NLP and ML techniques enables rapid tiered medical treatment based on limited data from the emergency scene, with significant advantages in terms of prediction accuracy.