Rationalizing Medical Relation Prediction from Corpus-level Statistics
The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center（俄亥俄州立大学韦克斯纳医学中心）；Nationwide Children’s Hospital（全国儿童医院）；Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital（全国儿童医院阿比盖尔·韦克斯纳研究所）
Nowadays, the interpretability of machine learning models is becoming increasingly important, especially in the medical domain. Aiming to shed some light on how to rationalize medical relation prediction, we present a new interpretable framework inspired by existing theories on how human memory works, e.g., theories of recall and recognition. Given the corpus-level statistics, i.e., a global co-occurrence graph of a clinical text corpus, to predict the relations between two entities, we first recall rich contexts associated with the target entities, and then recognize relational interactions between these contexts to form model rationales, which will contribute to the final prediction. We conduct experiments on a real-world public clinical dataset and show that our framework can not only achieve competitive predictive performance against a comprehensive list of neural baseline models, but also present rationales to justify its prediction. We further collaborate with medical experts deeply to verify the usefulness of our model rationales for clinical decision making.
Northeastern University（东北大学）；UT Austin（得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；UPenn（宾夕法尼亚大学）
We present a corpus of 5,000 richly annotated abstracts of medical articles describing clinical randomized controlled trials. Annotations include demarcations of text spans that describe the Patient population enrolled, the Interventions studied and to what they were Compared, and the Outcomes measured (the `PICO' elements). These spans are further annotated at a more granular level, e.g., individual interventions within them are marked and mapped onto a structured medical vocabulary. We acquired annotations from a diverse set of workers with varying levels of expertise and cost. We describe o…
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Accenture AI Labs（埃森哲人工智能实验室）
We present Reddit Health Online Talk (RedHOT), a corpus of 22,000 richly annotated social media posts from Reddit spanning 24 health conditions. Annotations include demarcations of spans corresponding to medical claims, personal experiences, and questions. We collect additional granular annotations on identified claims. Specifically, we mark snippets that describe patient Populations, Interventions, and Outcomes (PIO elements) within these. Using this corpus, we introduce the task of retrieving trustworthy evidence relevant to a given claim made on social media. We propose a new method to auto…
S92 research was begun in 1987 to analyze word frequencies in present-day Spanish for making speech pathology evaluation tools. 500 2,000-word samples of children, adolescents and adults' language were input between 1988-1991, calculations done in 1992; statistical and Lewandowski analyses were carried out in 1993.
Medical synonym identification has been an important part of medical natural language processing (NLP). However, in the field of Chinese medical synonym identification, there are problems like low precision and low recall rate. To solve the problem, in this paper, we propose a method for identifying Chinese medical synonyms. We first selected 13 features including Chinese and English features. Then we studied the synonym identification results of each feature alone and different combinations of the features. Through the comparison among identification results, we present an optimal combination…
The Arabic language suffers from a great shortage of datasets suitable for training deep learning models, and the existing ones include general non-specialized classifications. In this work, we introduce a new Arab medical dataset, which includes two thousand medical documents collected from several Arabic medical websites, in addition to the Arab Medical Encyclopedia. The dataset was built for the task of classifying texts and includes 10 classes (Blood, Bone, Cardiovascular, Ear, Endocrine, Eye, Gastrointestinal, Immune, Liver and Nephrological) diseases. Experiments on the dataset were perf…
There is a growing interest in creating tools to assist in clinical note generation using the audio of provider-patient encounters. Motivated by this goal and with the help of providers and medical scribes, we developed an annotation scheme to extract relevant clinical concepts. We used this annotation scheme to label a corpus of about 6k clinical encounters. This was used to train a state-of-the-art tagging model. We report ontologies, labeling results, model performances, and detailed analyses of the results. Our results show that the entities related to medications can be extracted with a r…
How do we know if a particular medical treatment actually works? Ideally one would consult all available evidence from relevant clinical trials. Unfortunately, such results are primarily disseminated in natural language scientific articles, imposing substantial burden on those trying to make sense of them. In this paper, we present a new task and corpus for making this unstructured evidence actionable. The task entails inferring reported findings from a full-text article describing a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with respect to a given intervention, comparator, and outcome of interest, e.…
Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）；Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth（达特茅斯盖泽尔医学院）
Objective: Currently, a major limitation for natural language processing (NLP) analyses in clinical applications is that a concept can be referenced in various forms across different texts. This paper introduces Multi-Ontology Refined Embeddings (MORE), a novel hybrid framework for incorporating domain knowledge from multiple ontologies into a distributional semantic model, learned from a corpus of clinical text. Materials and Methods: We use the RadCore and MIMIC-III free-text datasets for the corpus-based component of MORE. For the ontology-based part, we use the Medical Subject Headings (Me…
Clinical Document Corpora -- Real Ones, Translated and Synthetic Substitutes, and Assorted Domain Proxies: A Survey of Diversity in Corpus Design, with Focus on German Text Data
Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology (IMISE), University of Leipzig（莱比锡大学医学信息学、统计学与流行病学研究所）
Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院）
We present MedSim, a novel semantic SIMilarity method based on public well-established bio-MEDical knowledge graphs (KGs) and large-scale corpus, to study the therapeutic substitution of antibiotics. Besides hierarchy and corpus of KGs, MedSim further interprets medicine characteristics by constructing multi-dimensional medicine-specific feature vectors. Dataset of 528 antibiotic pairs scored by doctors is applied for evaluation and MedSim has produced statistically significant improvement over other semantic similarity methods. Furthermore, some promising applications of MedSim in drug substi…
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, large volumes of biomedical information concerning this new disease have been published on social media. Some of this information can pose a real danger to people's health, particularly when false information is shared, for instance recommendations on how to treat diseases without professional medical advice. Therefore, automatic fact-checking resources and systems developed specifically for the medical domain are crucial. While existing fact-checking resources cover COVID-19-related information in news or quantify the amount of misinformation in tweet…
PARHAF, a human-authored corpus of clinical reports for fictitious patients in French
Sorbonne Université, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, Inserm, Limics（索邦大学，索邦大学巴黎北分校，法国国家医学研究院，Limics）；Université Paris-Saclay, UVSQ, Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, Raymond Poincaré University Hospital, Infectious Disease Department（巴黎-萨克雷大学，UVSQ，巴黎公共医院，雷诺·帕洛西大学医院，传染病部门）；Yonsei University College of Medicine, Gangnam Severance Hospital, Department of Laboratory Medicine（延世大学医学院，江南松趾医院，实验室医学部）；Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, Department of medical information（巴黎公共医院，医学信息部门）；Health Data Hub, 75015, Paris, France（健康数据枢纽，75015，法国巴黎）；Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, LISN, 91400, Orsay, France（巴黎-萨克雷大学，法国国家科学研究中心，LISN，91400，法国奥赛）；Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL, CNRS, CEREMADE, 75016, Paris, France（巴黎-第七大学，PSL，法国国家科学研究中心，CEREMADE，75016，法国巴黎）
Conversational AI systems can engage in unsafe behaviour when handling users' medical queries that can have severe consequences and could even lead to deaths. Systems therefore need to be capable of both recognising the seriousness of medical inputs and producing responses with appropriate levels of risk. We create a corpus of human written English language medical queries and the responses of different types of systems. We label these with both crowdsourced and expert annotations. While individual crowdworkers may be unreliable at grading the seriousness of the prompts, their aggregated label…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）
Identifying cohorts of patients based on eligibility criteria such as medical conditions, procedures, and medication use is critical to recruitment for clinical trials. Such criteria are often most naturally described in free-text, using language familiar to clinicians and researchers. In order to identify potential participants at scale, these criteria must first be translated into queries on clinical databases, which can be labor-intensive and error-prone. Natural language processing (NLP) methods offer a potential means of such conversion into database queries automatically. However they mu…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of Massachusetts（马萨诸塞大学）；Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health（哈佛大学陈曾熙公共卫生学院）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Tufts University School of Medicine（塔夫茨大学医学院）；Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center（贝斯以色列女执事医疗中心）；Washington University School of Medicine（华盛顿大学医学院）；Philips Research North America（飞利浦北美研究院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）
A crucial step within secondary analysis of electronic health records (EHRs) is to identify the patient cohort under investigation. While EHRs contain medical billing codes that aim to represent the conditions and treatments patients may have, much of the information is only present in the patient notes. Therefore, it is critical to develop robust algorithms to infer patients' conditions and treatments from their written notes. In this paper, we introduce a dataset for patient phenotyping, a task that is defined as the identification of whether a patient has a given medical condition (also ref…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）
Expert-layman text style transfer technologies have the potential to improve communication between members of scientific communities and the general public. High-quality information produced by experts is often filled with difficult jargon laypeople struggle to understand. This is a particularly notable issue in the medical domain, where layman are often confused by medical text online. At present, two bottlenecks interfere with the goal of building high-quality medical expert-layman style transfer systems: a dearth of pretrained medical-domain language models spanning both expert and layman t…
Modern medical diagnosis relies on precise pain assessment tools in translating clinical information from patient to physician. The McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) is a clinical pain assessment technique that utilizes 78 adjectives of different intensities in 20 different categories to quantity a patient's pain. The questionnaire's efficacy depends on a predictable pattern of adjective use by patients experiencing pain. In this study, I recreate the MPQ's adjective intensity orderings using data gathered from patient forums and modern NLP techniques. I extract adjective intensity relationships…
Clinical notes often describe the most important aspects of a patient's physiology and are therefore critical to medical research. However, these notes are typically inaccessible to researchers without prior removal of sensitive protected health information (PHI), a natural language processing (NLP) task referred to as deidentification. Tools to automatically de-identify clinical notes are needed but are difficult to create without access to those very same notes containing PHI. This work presents a first step toward creating a large synthetically-identified corpus of clinical notes and corres…
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；New York University（纽约大学）；Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学布隆伯格公共卫生学院）
Public trust in medical information is crucial for successful application of public health policies such as vaccine uptake. This is especially true when the information is offered remotely, by chatbots, which have become increasingly popular in recent years. Here, we explore the challenging task of human-bot turn-level trust classification. We rely on a recently released data of observationally-collected (rather than crowdsourced) dialogs with VIRA chatbot, a COVID-19 Vaccine Information Resource Assistant. These dialogs are centered around questions and concerns about COVID-19 vaccines, where…
Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学哈索·普拉特纳研究所）；Friedrich Schiller University Jena（耶拿弗里德里希·席勒大学）；German Cancer Society（德国癌症协会）
The lack of publicly accessible text corpora is a major obstacle for progress in natural language processing. For medical applications, unfortunately, all language communities other than English are low-resourced. In this work, we present GGPONC (German Guideline Program in Oncology NLP Corpus), a freely distributable German language corpus based on clinical practice guidelines for oncology. This corpus is one of the largest ever built from German medical documents. Unlike clinical documents, clinical guidelines do not contain any patient-related information and can therefore be used without d…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
Automatic medical text simplification can assist providers with patient-friendly communication and make medical texts more accessible, thereby improving health literacy. But curating a quality corpus for this task requires the supervision of medical experts. In this work, we present $\textbf{Med-EASi}$ ($\underline{\textbf{Med}}$ical dataset for $\underline{\textbf{E}}$laborative and $\underline{\textbf{A}}$bstractive $\underline{\textbf{Si}}$mplification), a uniquely crowdsourced and finely annotated dataset for supervised simplification of short medical texts. Its $\textit{expert-layman-AI c…
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
We consider the problem of learning to simplify medical texts. This is important because most reliable, up-to-date information in biomedicine is dense with jargon and thus practically inaccessible to the lay audience. Furthermore, manual simplification does not scale to the rapidly growing body of biomedical literature, motivating the need for automated approaches. Unfortunately, there are no large-scale resources available for this task. In this work we introduce a new corpus of parallel texts in English comprising technical and lay summaries of all published evidence pertaining to different …
University of Western Ontario（西安大略大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；Unity Health Toronto（多伦多联合健康中心）
Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) indexing refers to the problem of assigning a given biomedical document with the most relevant labels from an extremely large set of MeSH terms. Currently, the vast number of biomedical articles in the PubMed database are manually annotated by human curators, which is time consuming and costly; therefore, a computational system that can assist the indexing is highly valuable. When developing supervised MeSH indexing systems, the availability of a large-scale annotated text corpus is desirable. A publicly available, large corpus that permits robust evaluation and …
We present a new corpus comprising annotations of medical entities in case reports, originating from PubMed Central's open access library. In the case reports, we annotate cases, conditions, findings, factors and negation modifiers. Moreover, where applicable, we annotate relations between these entities. As such, this is the first corpus of this kind made available to the scientific community in English. It enables the initial investigation of automatic information extraction from case reports through tasks like Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction and (sentence/paragraph) relevance …
Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, University of California, San Francisco（加州大学旧金山分校巴卡尔计算健康科学研究所）；Center for Data-driven Insights and Innovation, University of California, Office of the President（加州大学校长办公室数据驱动洞察与创新中心）；University of California, San Francisco（加州大学旧金山分校）
Several biomedical language models have already been developed for clinical language inference. However, these models typically utilize general vocabularies and are trained on relatively small clinical corpora. We sought to evaluate the impact of using a domain-specific vocabulary and a large clinical training corpus on the performance of these language models in clinical language inference. We trained a Bidirectional Encoder Decoder from Transformers (BERT) model using a diverse, deidentified corpus of 75 million deidentified clinical notes authored at the University of California, San Franci…
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；IBM TJ Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）；University of Illinois Urbana Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Carle Illinois College of Medicine（伊利诺伊大学卡勒医学院）
We propose a novel methodology to generate domain-specific large-scale question answering (QA) datasets by re-purposing existing annotations for other NLP tasks. We demonstrate an instance of this methodology in generating a large-scale QA dataset for electronic medical records by leveraging existing expert annotations on clinical notes for various NLP tasks from the community shared i2b2 datasets. The resulting corpus (emrQA) has 1 million question-logical form and 400,000+ question-answer evidence pairs. We characterize the dataset and explore its learning potential by training baseline mode…
Gaokerena: A Small Persian Medical Language Model Family
University of Isfahan（伊斯法罕大学）；University of Tehran（德黑兰大学）；University of Windsor（温莎大学）；Alzahra University（阿勒扎哈拉大学）；University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）
Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná（巴拉那天主教大学）；Philips Research North America（飞利浦北美研究院）
The high volume of research focusing on extracting patient's information from electronic health records (EHR) has led to an increase in the demand for annotated corpora, which are a very valuable resource for both the development and evaluation of natural language processing (NLP) algorithms. The absence of a multi-purpose clinical corpus outside the scope of the English language, especially in Brazilian Portuguese, is glaring and severely impacts scientific progress in the biomedical NLP field. In this study, we developed a semantically annotated corpus using clinical texts from multiple medi…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Queen’s University（女王大学）；Wind Information Co., Ltd（万得信息股份有限公司）；Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Beijing Language and Culture University（北京语言大学）
The introduction of ChatGPT has garnered widespread attention in both academic and industrial communities. ChatGPT is able to respond effectively to a wide range of human questions, providing fluent and comprehensive answers that significantly surpass previous public chatbots in terms of security and usefulness. On one hand, people are curious about how ChatGPT is able to achieve such strength and how far it is from human experts. On the other hand, people are starting to worry about the potential negative impacts that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT could have on society, such as fa…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Whilst there has been growing progress in Entity Linking (EL) for general language, existing datasets fail to address the complex nature of health terminology in layman's language. Meanwhile, there is a growing need for applications that can understand the public's voice in the health domain. To address this we introduce a new corpus called COMETA, consisting of 20k English biomedical entity mentions from Reddit expert-annotated with links to SNOMED CT, a widely-used medical knowledge graph. Our corpus satisfies a combination of desirable properties, from scale and coverage to diversity and qu…
Language Technology Research Center, School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学计算机科学与技术学院语言技术研究中心）；School of Software, Harbin University of Science and Technology（哈尔滨理工大学软件学院）
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) has become the leading cause of death in China, and most of the cases can be prevented by controlling risk factors. The goal of this study was to build a corpus of CVD risk factor annotations based on Chinese electronic medical records (CEMRs). This corpus is intended to be used to develop a risk factor information extraction system that, in turn, can be applied as a foundation for the further study of the progress of risk factors and CVD. We designed a light annotation task to capture CVD risk factors with indicators, temporal attributes and assertions that were e…
myMediWhisper: Construction of Burmese Medical Speech Corpus and Whisper Fine-Tuning for Clinical Dialogue ASR
National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC)（国家电子与计算机技术中心）；King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi（国王蒙固科技大学吞武里分校）；King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang（国王蒙固科技学院叻甲邦分校）
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）
The first step in discourse analysis involves dividing a text into segments. We annotate the first high-quality small-scale medical corpus in English with discourse segments and analyze how well news-trained segmenters perform on this domain. While we expectedly find a drop in performance, the nature of the segmentation errors suggests some problems can be addressed earlier in the pipeline, while others would require expanding the corpus to a trainable size to learn the nuances of the medical domain.
This paper describes novel models tailored for a new application, that of extracting the symptoms mentioned in clinical conversations along with their status. Lack of any publicly available corpus in this privacy-sensitive domain led us to develop our own corpus, consisting of about 3K conversations annotated by professional medical scribes. We propose two novel deep learning approaches to infer the symptom names and their status: (1) a new hierarchical span-attribute tagging (\SAT) model, trained using curriculum learning, and (2) a variant of sequence-to-sequence model which decodes the symp…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Alan Turing Institute（阿兰·图灵研究所）
Explaining the predictions of AI models is paramount in safety-critical applications, such as in legal or medical domains. One form of explanation for a prediction is an extractive rationale, i.e., a subset of features of an instance that lead the model to give its prediction on the instance. Previous works on generating extractive rationales usually employ a two-phase model: a selector that selects the most important features (i.e., the rationale) followed by a predictor that makes the prediction based exclusively on the selected features. One disadvantage of these works is that the main sign…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；TU Wien（维也纳工业大学）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）
Explaining the predictions of AI models is paramount in safety-critical applications, such as in legal or medical domains. One form of explanation for a prediction is an extractive rationale, i.e., a subset of features of an instance that lead the model to give its prediction on that instance. For example, the subphrase ``he stole the mobile phone'' can be an extractive rationale for the prediction of ``Theft''. Previous works on generating extractive rationales usually employ a two-phase model: a selector that selects the most important features (i.e., the rationale) followed by a predictor t…
Experience and Evidence are the eyes of an excellent summarizer! Towards Knowledge Infused Multi-modal Clinical Conversation Summarization
Indian Institute of Technology, Patna（印度理工学院巴特那分校）；Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）；All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Rishikesh（全印医学科学学院瑞诗凯诗分院）
BERT is a widely used pre-trained model in natural language processing. However, since BERT is quadratic to the text length, the BERT model is difficult to be used directly on the long-text corpus. In some fields, the collected text data may be quite long, such as in the health care field. Therefore, to apply the pre-trained language knowledge of BERT to long text, in this paper, imitating the skimming-intensive reading method used by humans when reading a long paragraph, the Skimming-Intensive Model (SkIn) is proposed. It can dynamically select the critical information in the text so that the…
Deep learning research on relation classification has achieved solid performance in the general domain. This study proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture with a multi-pooling operation for medical relation classification on clinical records and explores a loss function with a category-level constraint matrix. Experiments using the 2010 i2b2/VA relation corpus demonstrate these models, which do not depend on any external features, outperform previous single-model methods and our best model is competitive with the existing ensemble-based method.
