Using LLMs for Multilingual Clinical Entity Linking to ICD-10

Sylvia Vassileva, Ivan K. Koychev, Svetla Boytcheva


Abstract
The linking of clinical entities is a crucial part of extracting structured information from clinical texts. It is the process of assigning a code from a medical ontology or classification to a phrase in the text. The International Classification of Diseases - 10th revision (ICD-10) is an international standard for classifying diseases for statistical and insurance purposes. Automatically assigning the correct ICD-10 code to terms in discharge summaries will simplify the work of healthcare professionals and ensure consistent coding in hospitals. Our paper proposes an approach for linking clinical terms to ICD-10 codes in different languages using Large Language Models (LLMs). The approach consists of a multistage pipeline that uses clinical dictionaries to match unambiguous terms in the text and then applies in-context learning with GPT-4.1 to predict the ICD-10 code for the terms that do not match the dictionary. Our system shows promising results in predicting ICD-10 codes on different benchmark datasets in Spanish - 0.89 F1 for categories and 0.78 F1 on subcategories on CodiEsp, and Greek - 0.85 F1 on ElCardioCC.
Anthology ID:
2025.ranlp-1.151
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Galia Angelova, Maria Kunilovskaya, Marie Escribe, Ruslan Mitkov
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
1304–1308
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.151/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sylvia Vassileva, Ivan K. Koychev, and Svetla Boytcheva. 2025. Using LLMs for Multilingual Clinical Entity Linking to ICD-10. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era, pages 1304–1308, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
Using LLMs for Multilingual Clinical Entity Linking to ICD-10 (Vassileva et al., RANLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.151.pdf