ABSTRACT
Electronic Health Records contain a lot of information in natural language that is not expressed in the structured clinical data. Especially in the case of new diseases such as COVID-19, this information is crucial to get a better understanding of patient recovery patterns and factors that may play a role in it. However, the language in these records is very different from standard language and generic natural language processing tools cannot easily be applied out-of-the-box. In this paper, we present a fine-tuned Dutch language model specifically developed for the language in these health records that can determine the functional level of patients according to a standard coding framework from the World Health Organization. We provide evidence that our classification performs at a sufficient level (F1-score above 80% for the main categories and error rates of less than 1 level on a 5-point Likert scale for levels) to generate patient recovery patterns that can be used to analyse factors that contribute to the rehabilitation of COVID-19 patients and to predict individual patient recovery of functioning. © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0.
ABSTRACT
There are many ways machine learning and big data analytics are used in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, including predictions, risk management, diagnostics, and prevention. This study focuses on predicting COVID-19 patient shielding—identifying and protecting patients who are clinically extremely vulnerable from coronavirus. This study focuses on techniques used for the multi-label classification of medical text. Using the information published by the United Kingdom NHS and the World Health Organisation, we present a novel approach to predicting COVID-19 patient shielding as a multi-label classification problem. We use publicly available, de-identified ICU medical text data for our experiments. The labels are derived from the published COVID-19 patient shielding data. We present an extensive comparison across 12 multi-label classifiers from the simple binary relevance to neural networks and the most recent transformers. To the best of our knowledge this is the first comprehensive study, where such a range of multi-label classifiers for medical text are considered. We highlight the benefits of various approaches, and argue that, for the task at hand, both predictive accuracy and processing time are essential. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
As the volume of published medical research continues to grow rapidly, staying up-to-date with the best-available research evidence regarding specific topics is becoming an increasingly challenging problem for medical experts and researchers. The current COVID19 pandemic is a good example of a topic on which research evidence is rapidly evolving. Automatic query-focused text summarization approaches may help researchers to swiftly review research evidence by presenting salient and query-relevant information from newly-published articles in a condensed manner. Typical medical text summarization approaches require domain knowledge, and the performances of such systems rely on resource-heavy medical domain-specific knowledge sources and pre-processing methods (e.g., text classification) for deriving semantic information. Consequently, these systems are often difficult to speedily customize, extend, or deploy in low-resource settings, and they are often operationally slow. In this paper, we propose a fast and simple extractive summarization approach that can be easily deployed and run, and may thus aid medical experts and researchers obtain fast access to the latest research evidence. At runtime, our system utilizes similarity measurements derived from pre-trained medical domain-specific word embeddings in addition to simple features, rather than computationally-expensive pre-processing and resource-heavy knowledge bases. Automatic evaluation using ROUGE-a summary evaluation tool-on a public dataset for evidence-based medicine shows that our system's performance, despite the simple implementation, is statistically comparable with the state-of-the-art. Extrinsic manual evaluation based on recently-released COVID19 articles demonstrates that the summarizer performance is close to human agreement, which is generally low, for extractive summarization.