Improving Precancerous Case Characterization via Transformer-based Ensemble Learning

Yizhen Zhong, Jiajie Xiao, Thomas Vetterli, Mahan Matin, Ellen Loo, Jimmy Lin, Richard Bourgon, Ofer Shapira


Abstract
The application of natural language processing (NLP) to cancer pathology reports has been focused on detecting cancer cases, largely ignoring precancerous cases. Improving the characterization of precancerous adenomas assists in developing diagnostic tests for early cancer detection and prevention, especially for colorectal cancer (CRC). Here we developed transformer-based deep neural network NLP models to perform the CRC phenotyping, with the goal of extracting precancerous lesion attributes and distinguishing cancer and precancerous cases. We achieved 0.914 macro-F1 scores for classifying patients into negative, non-advanced adenoma, advanced adenoma and CRC. We further improved the performance to 0.923 using an ensemble of classifiers for cancer status classification and lesion size named-entity recognition (NER). Our results demonstrated the potential of using NLP to leverage real-world health record data to facilitate the development of diagnostic tests for early cancer prevention.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-industry.38
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Yunyao Li, Angeliki Lazaridou
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
379–389
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-industry.38
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-industry.38
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yizhen Zhong, Jiajie Xiao, Thomas Vetterli, Mahan Matin, Ellen Loo, Jimmy Lin, Richard Bourgon, and Ofer Shapira. 2022. Improving Precancerous Case Characterization via Transformer-based Ensemble Learning. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 379–389, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Precancerous Case Characterization via Transformer-based Ensemble Learning (Zhong et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-industry.38.pdf