From Free-text Drug Labels to Structured Medication Terminology with BERT and GPT.

We present a method to enrich controlled medication terminology from free-text drug labels. This is important because, while controlled medication terminology capture well-structured medication information, much of the information pertaining to medications is still found in free-text. First, we compared different Named Entity Recognition (NER) models including rule-based, feature-based, deep learning-based models with Transformers as well as ChatGPT, few-shot and fine-tuned GPT-3 to find the most suitable model that accurately extracts medication entities (ingredients, brand, dose, etc.) from free-text. Then, a rule-based Relation Extraction algorithm transforms NER results into a well-structured medication knowledge graph. Finally, a Medication Searching method takes the knowledge graph and matches it to relevant medications in the terminology server. An empirical evaluation on real-world drug labels shows that BERT-CRF was the most effective NER model with F-measure 95%. After performing terms normalization, the Medication Searching achieved an accuracy of 77% for when matching a label to relevant medication in the terminology server. The NER and Medication Searching models could be deployed as a web service capable of accepting free-text queries and returning structured medication information; thus providing a useful means of better managing medications information found in different health systems.

Semantic Search for Large Scale Clinical Ontologies.

Finding concepts in large clinical ontologies can be challenging when queries use different vocabularies. A search algorithm that overcomes this problem is useful in applications such as concept normalisation and ontology matching, where concepts can be referred to in different ways, using different synonyms. In this paper, we present a deep learning based approach to build a semantic search system for large clinical ontologies. We propose a Triplet-BERT model and a method that generates training data directly from the ontologies. The model is evaluated using five real benchmark data sets and the results show that our approach achieves high results on both free text to concept and concept to concept searching tasks, and outperforms all baseline methods.

Can Wikipedia Be Used to Derive an Open Clinical Terminology?

Clinical terminologies play an essential role in enabling semantic interoperability between medical records. However, existing terminologies have several issues that impact data quality, such as content gaps and slow updates. In this study we explore the suitability of existing, community-driven resources, specifically Wikipedia, as a potential source to bootstrap an open clinical terminology, in terms of content coverage. In order to establish the extent of the coverage, a team of expert clinical terminologists manually mapped a clinically-relevant subset of SNOMED CT to Wikipedia articles. The results show that approximately 80% of the concepts are covered by Wikipedia. Most concepts that do not have a direct match in Wikipedia are composable from multiple articles. These findings are encouraging and suggest that it should be possible to bootstrap an open clinical terminology from Wikipedia.