Towards Automatic Generation of Shareable Synthetic Clinical Notes Using Neural Language Models

Large-scale clinical data is invaluable to driving many computational scientific advances today. However, understandable concerns regarding patient privacy hinder the open dissemination of such data and give rise to suboptimal siloed research. De-identification methods attempt to address these concerns but were shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks. In this work, we focus on the vast amounts of unstructured natural language data stored in clinical notes and propose to automatically generate synthetic clinical notes that are more amenable to sharing using generative models trained on real de-identified records. To evaluate the merit of such notes, we measure both their privacy preservation properties as well as utility in training clinical NLP models. Experiments using neural language models yield notes whose utility is close to that of the real ones in some clinical NLP tasks, yet leave ample room for future improvements.Comment: Clinical NLP Workshop 201

Synthetic Observational Health Data with GANs: from slow adoption to a boom in medical research and ultimately digital twins?

After being collected for patient care, Observational Health Data (OHD) can further benefit patient well-being by sustaining the development of health informatics and medical research. Vast potential is unexploited because of the fiercely private nature of patient-related data and regulations to protect it. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently emerged as a groundbreaking way to learn generative models that produce realistic synthetic data. They have revolutionized practices in multiple domains such as self-driving cars, fraud detection, digital twin simulations in industrial sectors, and medical imaging. The digital twin concept could readily apply to modelling and quantifying disease progression. In addition, GANs posses many capabilities relevant to common problems in healthcare: lack of data, class imbalance, rare diseases, and preserving privacy. Unlocking open access to privacy-preserving OHD could be transformative for scientific research. In the midst of COVID-19, the healthcare system is facing unprecedented challenges, many of which of are data related for the reasons stated above. Considering these facts, publications concerning GAN applied to OHD seemed to be severely lacking. To uncover the reasons for this slow adoption, we broadly reviewed the published literature on the subject. Our findings show that the properties of OHD were initially challenging for the existing GAN algorithms (unlike medical imaging, for which state-of-the-art model were directly transferable) and the evaluation synthetic data lacked clear metrics. We find more publications on the subject than expected, starting slowly in 2017, and since then at an increasing rate. The difficulties of OHD remain, and we discuss issues relating to evaluation, consistency, benchmarking, data modelling, and reproducibility.Comment: 31 pages (10 in previous version), not including references and glossary, 51 in total. Inclusion of a large number of recent publications and expansion of the discussion accordingl