Felix Gers


2022

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This Patient Looks Like That Patient: Prototypical Networks for Interpretable Diagnosis Prediction from Clinical Text
Betty van Aken | Jens-Michalis Papaioannou | Marcel Naik | Georgios Eleftheriadis | Wolfgang Nejdl | Felix Gers | Alexander Loeser
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The use of deep neural models for diagnosis prediction from clinical text has shown promising results. However, in clinical practice such models must not only be accurate, but provide doctors with interpretable and helpful results. We introduce ProtoPatient, a novel method based on prototypical networks and label-wise attention with both of these abilities. ProtoPatient makes predictions based on parts of the text that are similar to prototypical patients—providing justifications that doctors understand. We evaluate the model on two publicly available clinical datasets and show that it outperforms existing baselines. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations with medical doctors further demonstrate that the model provides valuable explanations for clinical decision support.

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Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer for Clinical Phenotyping
Jens-Michalis Papaioannou | Paul Grundmann | Betty van Aken | Athanasios Samaras | Ilias Kyparissidis | George Giannakoulas | Felix Gers | Alexander Loeser
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Clinical phenotyping enables the automatic extraction of clinical conditions from patient records, which can be beneficial to doctors and clinics worldwide. However, current state-of-the-art models are mostly applicable to clinical notes written in English. We therefore investigate cross-lingual knowledge transfer strategies to execute this task for clinics that do not use the English language and have a small amount of in-domain data available. Our results reveal two strategies that outperform the state-of-the-art: Translation-based methods in combination with domain-specific encoders and cross-lingual encoders plus adapters. We find that these strategies perform especially well for classifying rare phenotypes and we advise on which method to prefer in which situation. Our results show that using multilingual data overall improves clinical phenotyping models and can compensate for data sparseness.

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Attention Networks for Augmenting Clinical Text with Support Sets for Diagnosis Prediction
Paul Grundmann | Tom Oberhauser | Felix Gers | Alexander Löser
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Diagnosis prediction on admission notes is a core clinical task. However, these notes may incompletely describe the patient. Also, clinical language models may suffer from idiosyncratic language or imbalanced vocabulary for describing diseases or symptoms. We tackle the task of diagnosis prediction, which consists of predicting future patient diagnoses from clinical texts at the time of admission. We improve the performance on this task by introducing an additional signal from support sets of diagnostic codes from prior admissions or as they emerge during differential diagnosis. To enhance the robustness of diagnosis prediction methods, we propose to augment clinical text with potentially complementary set data from diagnosis codes from previous patient visits or from codes that emerge from the current admission as they become available through diagnostics. We discuss novel attention network architectures and augmentation strategies to solve this problem. Our experiments reveal that support sets improve the performance drastically to predict less common diagnosis codes. Our approach clearly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art PubMedBERT baseline by up 3% points. Furthermore, we find that support sets drastically improve the performance for pregnancy- and gynecology-related diagnoses up to 32.9% points compared to the baseline.

2021

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Clinical Outcome Prediction from Admission Notes using Self-Supervised Knowledge Integration
Betty van Aken | Jens-Michalis Papaioannou | Manuel Mayrdorfer | Klemens Budde | Felix Gers | Alexander Loeser
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

Outcome prediction from clinical text can prevent doctors from overlooking possible risks and help hospitals to plan capacities. We simulate patients at admission time, when decision support can be especially valuable, and contribute a novel *admission to discharge* task with four common outcome prediction targets: Diagnoses at discharge, procedures performed, in-hospital mortality and length-of-stay prediction. The ideal system should infer outcomes based on symptoms, pre-conditions and risk factors of a patient. We evaluate the effectiveness of language models to handle this scenario and propose *clinical outcome pre-training* to integrate knowledge about patient outcomes from multiple public sources. We further present a simple method to incorporate ICD code hierarchy into the models. We show that our approach improves performance on the outcome tasks against several baselines. A detailed analysis reveals further strengths of the model, including transferability, but also weaknesses such as handling of vital values and inconsistencies in the underlying data.