Marcel Naik


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.