The electronic health record (EHR) contains a large amount of
multi-dimensional and unstructured clinical data of significant operational and
research value. Distinguished from previous studies, our approach embraces a
double-annotated dataset and strays away from obscure "black-box" models to
comprehensive deep learning models. In this paper, we present a novel neural
attention mechanism that not only classifies clinically important findings.
Specifically, convolutional neural networks (CNN) with attention analysis are
used to classify radiology head computed tomography reports based on five
categories that radiologists would account for in assessing acute and
communicable findings in daily practice. The experiments show that our CNN
attention models outperform non-neural models, especially when trained on a
larger dataset. Our attention analysis demonstrates the intuition behind the
classifier's decision by generating a heatmap that highlights attended terms
used by the CNN model; this is valuable when potential downstream medical
decisions are to be performed by human experts or the classifier information is
to be used in cohort construction such as for epidemiological studies