Automated Calculation of the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) Intra-Abdominal Injury Rule from Unstructured Emergency Department Notes Using a Large Language Model

Objective

The Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) intra-abdominal injury clinical prediction rule identifies children at very low risk for clinically significant intra-abdominal injury after blunt abdominal trauma. However, retrospective evaluation of the rule's use in practice requires resource-intensive chart review. We investigated whether large language models (LLMs) can automatically calculate PECARN intra-abdominal injury risk scores from real-world unstructured emergency department (ED) notes.