285 research outputs found
Lightweight transformers for clinical natural language processing
Specialised pre-trained language models are becoming more frequent in Natural language Processing (NLP) since they can potentially outperform models trained on generic texts. BioBERT (Sanh et al., Distilbert, a distilled version of bert: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter. arXiv preprint arXiv: 1910.01108, 2019) and BioClinicalBERT (Alsentzer et al., Publicly available clinical bert embeddings. In Proceedings of the 2nd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop, pp. 72–78, 2019) are two examples of such models that have shown promise in medical NLP tasks. Many of these models are overparametrised and resource-intensive, but thanks to techniques like knowledge distillation, it is possible to create smaller versions that perform almost as well as their larger counterparts. In this work, we specifically focus on development of compact language models for processing clinical texts (i.e. progress notes, discharge summaries, etc). We developed a number of efficient lightweight clinical transformers using knowledge distillation and continual learning, with the number of parameters ranging from million to million. These models performed comparably to larger models such as BioBERT and ClinicalBioBERT and significantly outperformed other compact models trained on general or biomedical data. Our extensive evaluation was done across several standard datasets and covered a wide range of clinical text-mining tasks, including natural language inference, relation extraction, named entity recognition and sequence classification. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study specifically focused on creating efficient and compact transformers for clinical NLP tasks. The models and code used in this study can be found on our Huggingface profile at https://huggingface.co/nlpie and Github page at https://github.com/nlpie-research/Lightweight-Clinical-Transformers, respectively, promoting reproducibility of our results
Clustering Italian medical texts: a case study on referrals
In the medical domain, there is a large amount of valuable information
that is stored in textual format. These unstructured data have long been ignored, due
to the difficulties of introducing them in statistical models, but in the last years, the
field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has seen relevant improvements, with
models capable of achieving relevant results in various tasks, including information
extraction, classification and clustering. NLP models are typically language-specific
and often domain-specific, but most of the work to date has been focused on the
English language, especially in the medical domain. In this work, we propose a
pipeline for clustering Italian medical texts, with a case study on clinical questions
reported in referral
Assessing mortality prediction through different representation models based on concepts extracted from clinical notes
Recent years have seen particular interest in using electronic medical
records (EMRs) for secondary purposes to enhance the quality and safety of
healthcare delivery. EMRs tend to contain large amounts of valuable clinical
notes. Learning of embedding is a method for converting notes into a format
that makes them comparable. Transformer-based representation models have
recently made a great leap forward. These models are pre-trained on large
online datasets to understand natural language texts effectively. The quality
of a learning embedding is influenced by how clinical notes are used as input
to representation models. A clinical note has several sections with different
levels of information value. It is also common for healthcare providers to use
different expressions for the same concept. Existing methods use clinical notes
directly or with an initial preprocessing as input to representation models.
However, to learn a good embedding, we identified the most essential clinical
notes section. We then mapped the extracted concepts from selected sections to
the standard names in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). We used the
standard phrases corresponding to the unique concepts as input for clinical
models. We performed experiments to measure the usefulness of the learned
embedding vectors in the task of hospital mortality prediction on a subset of
the publicly available Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-III)
dataset. According to the experiments, clinical transformer-based
representation models produced better results with getting input generated by
standard names of extracted unique concepts compared to other input formats.
The best-performing models were BioBERT, PubMedBERT, and UmlsBERT,
respectively
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