Dataset Information

Hierarchical attention networks for information extraction from cancer pathology reports.

ABSTRACT: OBJECTIVE:We explored how a deep learning (DL) approach based on hierarchical attention networks (HANs) can improve model performance for multiple information extraction tasks from unstructured cancer pathology reports compared to conventional methods that do not suf?ciently capture syntactic and semantic contexts from free-text documents. MATERIALS AND METHODS:Data for our analyses were obtained from 942 deidenti?ed pathology reports collected by the National Cancer Institute Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program. The HAN was implemented for 2 information extraction tasks: (1) primary site, matched to 12 International Classification of Diseases for Oncology topography codes (7 breast, 5 lung primary sites), and (2) histological grade classi?cation, matched to G1-G4. Model performance metrics were compared to conventional machine learning (ML) approaches including naive Bayes, logistic regression, support vector machine, random forest, and extreme gradient boosting, and other DL models, including a recurrent neural network (RNN), a recurrent neural network with attention (RNN w/A), and a convolutional neural network. RESULTS:Our results demonstrate that for both information tasks, HAN performed signi?cantly better compared to the conventional ML and DL techniques. In particular, across the 2 tasks, the mean micro and macro F-scores for the HAN with pretraining were (0.852,0.708), compared to naive Bayes (0.518, 0.213), logistic regression (0.682, 0.453), support vector machine (0.634, 0.434), random forest (0.698, 0.508), extreme gradient boosting (0.696, 0.522), RNN (0.505, 0.301), RNN w/A (0.637, 0.471), and convolutional neural network (0.714, 0.460). CONCLUSIONS:HAN-based DL models show promise in information abstraction tasks within unstructured clinical pathology reports.

SUBMITTER: Gao S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7282502 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Hierarchical attention networks for information extraction from cancer pathology reports.

Gao Shang S Young Michael T MT Qiu John X JX Yoon Hong-Jun HJ Christian James B JB Fearn Paul A PA Tourassi Georgia D GD Ramanthan Arvind A

Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA 20180301 3

<h4>Objective</h4>We explored how a deep learning (DL) approach based on hierarchical attention networks (HANs) can improve model performance for multiple information extraction tasks from unstructured cancer pathology reports compared to conventional methods that do not sufﬁciently capture syntactic and semantic contexts from free-text documents.<h4>Materials and methods</h4>Data for our analyses were obtained from 942 deidentiﬁed pathology reports collected by the National Cancer Institute Sur ...[more]

PMID: 29155996

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Project description:ObjectiveWe implement 2 different multitask learning (MTL) techniques, hard parameter sharing and cross-stitch, to train a word-level convolutional neural network (CNN) specifically designed for automatic extraction of cancer data from unstructured text in pathology reports. We show the importance of learning related information extraction (IE) tasks leveraging shared representations across the tasks to achieve state-of-the-art performance in classification accuracy and computational efficiency.Materials and methodsMultitask CNN (MTCNN) attempts to tackle document information extraction by learning to extract multiple key cancer characteristics simultaneously. We trained our MTCNN to perform 5 information extraction tasks: (1) primary cancer site (65 classes), (2) laterality (4 classes), (3) behavior (3 classes), (4) histological type (63 classes), and (5) histological grade (5 classes). We evaluated the performance on a corpus of 95 231 pathology documents (71 223 unique tumors) obtained from the Louisiana Tumor Registry. We compared the performance of the MTCNN models against single-task CNN models and 2 traditional machine learning approaches, namely support vector machine (SVM) and random forest classifier (RFC).ResultsMTCNNs offered superior performance across all 5 tasks in terms of classification accuracy as compared with the other machine learning models. Based on retrospective evaluation, the hard parameter sharing and cross-stitch MTCNN models correctly classified 59.04% and 57.93% of the pathology reports respectively across all 5 tasks. The baseline models achieved 53.68% (CNN), 46.37% (RFC), and 36.75% (SVM). Based on prospective evaluation, the percentages of correctly classified cases across the 5 tasks were 60.11% (hard parameter sharing), 58.13% (cross-stitch), 51.30% (single-task CNN), 42.07% (RFC), and 35.16% (SVM). Moreover, hard parameter sharing MTCNNs outperformed the other models in computational efficiency by using about the same number of trainable parameters as a single-task CNN.ConclusionsThe hard parameter sharing MTCNN offers superior classification accuracy for automated coding support of pathology documents across a wide range of cancers and multiple information extraction tasks while maintaining similar training and inference time as those of a single task-specific model.

Project description:BackgroundLung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. Clinical staging of lung cancer plays a crucial role in making treatment decisions and evaluating prognosis. However, in clinical practice, approximately one-half of the clinical stages of lung cancer patients are inconsistent with their pathological stages. As one of the most important diagnostic modalities for staging, chest computed tomography (CT) provides a wealth of information about cancer staging, but the free-text nature of the CT reports obstructs their computerization.ObjectiveWe aimed to automatically extract the staging-related information from CT reports to support accurate clinical staging of lung cancer.MethodsIn this study, we developed an information extraction (IE) system to extract the staging-related information from CT reports. The system consisted of the following three parts: named entity recognition (NER), relation classification (RC), and postprocessing (PP). We first summarized 22 questions about lung cancer staging based on the TNM staging guideline. Next, three state-of-the-art NER algorithms were implemented to recognize the entities of interest. Next, we designed a novel RC method using the relation sign constraint (RSC) to classify the relations between entities. Finally, a rule-based PP module was established to obtain the formatted answers using the results of NER and RC.ResultsWe evaluated the developed IE system on a clinical data set containing 392 chest CT reports collected from the Department of Thoracic Surgery II in the Peking University Cancer Hospital. The experimental results showed that the bidirectional encoder representation from transformers (BERT) model outperformed the iterated dilated convolutional neural networks-conditional random field (ID-CNN-CRF) and bidirectional long short-term memory networks-conditional random field (Bi-LSTM-CRF) for NER tasks with macro-F1 scores of 80.97% and 90.06% under the exact and inexact matching schemes, respectively. For the RC task, the proposed RSC showed better performance than the baseline methods. Further, the BERT-RSC model achieved the best performance with a macro-F1 score of 97.13% and a micro-F1 score of 98.37%. Moreover, the rule-based PP module could correctly obtain the formatted results using the extractions of NER and RC, achieving a macro-F1 score of 94.57% and a micro-F1 score of 96.74% for all the 22 questions.ConclusionsWe conclude that the developed IE system can effectively and accurately extract information about lung cancer staging from CT reports. Experimental results show that the extracted results have significant potential for further use in stage verification and prediction to facilitate accurate clinical staging.

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Hierarchical attention networks for information extraction from cancer pathology reports.

Publications

Hierarchical attention networks for information extraction from cancer pathology reports.

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