12,697 research outputs found
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
Implementing a Portable Clinical NLP System with a Common Data Model - a Lisp Perspective
This paper presents a Lisp architecture for a portable NLP system, termed
LAPNLP, for processing clinical notes. LAPNLP integrates multiple standard,
customized and in-house developed NLP tools. Our system facilitates portability
across different institutions and data systems by incorporating an enriched
Common Data Model (CDM) to standardize necessary data elements. It utilizes
UMLS to perform domain adaptation when integrating generic domain NLP tools. It
also features stand-off annotations that are specified by positional reference
to the original document. We built an interval tree based search engine to
efficiently query and retrieve the stand-off annotations by specifying
positional requirements. We also developed a utility to convert an inline
annotation format to stand-off annotations to enable the reuse of clinical text
datasets with inline annotations. We experimented with our system on several
NLP facilitated tasks including computational phenotyping for lymphoma patients
and semantic relation extraction for clinical notes. These experiments
showcased the broader applicability and utility of LAPNLP.Comment: 6 pages, accepted by IEEE BIBM 2018 as regular pape
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