Section Classification in Clinical Notes with Multi-task Transformers

Fan Zhang, Itay Laish, Ayelet Benjamini, Amir Feder


Abstract
Clinical notes are the backbone of electronic health records, often containing vital information not observed in other structured data. Unfortunately, the unstructured nature of clinical notes can lead to critical patient-related information being lost. Algorithms that organize clinical notes into distinct sections are often proposed in order to allow medical professionals to better access information in a given note. These algorithms, however, often assume a given partition over the note, and classify section types given this information. In this paper, we propose a multi-task solution for note sectioning, where a single model identifies context changes and labels each section with its medically-relevant title. Results on in-distribution (MIMIC-III) and out-of-distribution (private held-out) datasets reveal that our approach successfully identifies note sections across different hospital systems.
Anthology ID:
2022.louhi-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis (LOUHI)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Alberto Lavelli, Eben Holderness, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Anne-Lyse Minard, James Pustejovsky, Fabio Rinaldi
Venue:
Louhi
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
54–59
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.louhi-1.7
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.louhi-1.7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fan Zhang, Itay Laish, Ayelet Benjamini, and Amir Feder. 2022. Section Classification in Clinical Notes with Multi-task Transformers. In Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis (LOUHI), pages 54–59, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Section Classification in Clinical Notes with Multi-task Transformers (Zhang et al., Louhi 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.louhi-1.7.pdf