Dataset Information

Adapting Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to Assess Clinical Semantic Textual Similarity: Algorithm Development and Validation Study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Natural Language Understanding enables automatic extraction of relevant information from clinical text data, which are acquired every day in hospitals. In 2018, the language model Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) was introduced, generating new state-of-the-art results on several downstream tasks. The National NLP Clinical Challenges (n2c2) is an initiative that strives to tackle such downstream tasks on domain-specific clinical data. In this paper, we present the results of our participation in the 2019 n2c2 and related work completed thereafter.

Objective

The objective of this study was to optimally leverage BERT for the task of assessing the semantic textual similarity of clinical text data.

Methods

We used BERT as an initial baseline and analyzed the results, which we used as a starting point to develop 3 different approaches where we (1) added additional, handcrafted sentence similarity features to the classifier token of BERT and combined the results with more features in multiple regression estimators, (2) incorporated a built-in ensembling method, M-Heads, into BERT by duplicating the regression head and applying an adapted training strategy to facilitate the focus of the heads on different input patterns of the medical sentences, and (3) developed a graph-based similarity approach for medications, which allows extrapolating similarities across known entities from the training set. The approaches were evaluated with the Pearson correlation coefficient between the predicted scores and ground truth of the official training and test dataset.

Results

We improved the performance of BERT on the test dataset from a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.859 to 0.883 using a combination of the M-Heads method and the graph-based similarity approach. We also show differences between the test and training dataset and how the two datasets influenced the results.

Conclusions

We found that using a graph-based similarity approach has the potential to extrapolate domain specific knowledge to unseen sentences. We observed that it is easily possible to obtain deceptive results from the test dataset, especially when the distribution of the data samples is different between training and test datasets.

SUBMITTER: Kades K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7889424 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Adapting Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to Assess Clinical Semantic Textual Similarity: Algorithm Development and Validation Study.

Kades Klaus K Sellner Jan J Koehler Gregor G Full Peter M PM Lai T Y Emmy TYE Kleesiek Jens J Maier-Hein Klaus H KH

JMIR medical informatics 20210203 2

<h4>Background</h4>Natural Language Understanding enables automatic extraction of relevant information from clinical text data, which are acquired every day in hospitals. In 2018, the language model Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) was introduced, generating new state-of-the-art results on several downstream tasks. The National NLP Clinical Challenges (n2c2) is an initiative that strives to tackle such downstream tasks on domain-specific clinical data. In this paper ...[more]

PMID: 33533728

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Project description:BACKGROUND:The bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model has achieved great success in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as named entity recognition and question answering. However, little prior work has explored this model to be used for an important task in the biomedical and clinical domains, namely entity normalization. OBJECTIVE:We aim to investigate the effectiveness of BERT-based models for biomedical or clinical entity normalization. In addition, our second objective is to investigate whether the domains of training data influence the performances of BERT-based models as well as the degree of influence. METHODS:Our data was comprised of 1.5 million unlabeled electronic health record (EHR) notes. We first fine-tuned BioBERT on this large collection of unlabeled EHR notes. This generated our BERT-based model trained using 1.5 million electronic health record notes (EhrBERT). We then further fine-tuned EhrBERT, BioBERT, and BERT on three annotated corpora for biomedical and clinical entity normalization: the Medication, Indication, and Adverse Drug Events (MADE) 1.0 corpus, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) disease corpus, and the Chemical-Disease Relations (CDR) corpus. We compared our models with two state-of-the-art normalization systems, namely MetaMap and disease name normalization (DNorm). RESULTS:EhrBERT achieved 40.95% F1 in the MADE 1.0 corpus for mapping named entities to the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities and the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT), which have about 380,000 terms. In this corpus, EhrBERT outperformed MetaMap by 2.36% in F1. For the NCBI disease corpus and CDR corpus, EhrBERT also outperformed DNorm by improving the F1 scores from 88.37% and 89.92% to 90.35% and 93.82%, respectively. Compared with BioBERT and BERT, EhrBERT outperformed them on the MADE 1.0 corpus and the CDR corpus. CONCLUSIONS:Our work shows that BERT-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance for biomedical and clinical entity normalization. BERT-based models can be readily fine-tuned to normalize any kind of named entities.

Project description:BackgroundSemantic textual similarity (STS) captures the degree of semantic similarity between texts. It plays an important role in many natural language processing applications such as text summarization, question answering, machine translation, information retrieval, dialog systems, plagiarism detection, and query ranking. STS has been widely studied in the general English domain. However, there exists few resources for STS tasks in the clinical domain and in languages other than English, such as Japanese.ObjectiveThe objective of this study is to capture semantic similarity between Japanese clinical texts (Japanese clinical STS) by creating a Japanese dataset that is publicly available.MaterialsWe created two datasets for Japanese clinical STS: (1) Japanese case reports (CR dataset) and (2) Japanese electronic medical records (EMR dataset). The CR dataset was created from publicly available case reports extracted from the CiNii database. The EMR dataset was created from Japanese electronic medical records.MethodsWe used an approach based on bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) to capture the semantic similarity between the clinical domain texts. BERT is a popular approach for transfer learning and has been proven to be effective in achieving high accuracy for small datasets. We implemented two Japanese pretrained BERT models: a general Japanese BERT and a clinical Japanese BERT. The general Japanese BERT is pretrained on Japanese Wikipedia texts while the clinical Japanese BERT is pretrained on Japanese clinical texts.ResultsThe BERT models performed well in capturing semantic similarity in our datasets. The general Japanese BERT outperformed the clinical Japanese BERT and achieved a high correlation with human score (0.904 in the CR dataset and 0.875 in the EMR dataset). It was unexpected that the general Japanese BERT outperformed the clinical Japanese BERT on clinical domain dataset. This could be due to the fact that the general Japanese BERT is pretrained on a wide range of texts compared with the clinical Japanese BERT.

Project description:BackgroundLiver cancer is a substantial disease burden in China. As one of the primary diagnostic tools for detecting liver cancer, dynamic contrast-enhanced computed tomography provides detailed evidences for diagnosis that are recorded in free-text radiology reports.ObjectiveThe aim of our study was to apply a deep learning model and rule-based natural language processing (NLP) method to identify evidences for liver cancer diagnosis automatically.MethodsWe proposed a pretrained, fine-tuned BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers)-based BiLSTM-CRF (Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory-Conditional Random Field) model to recognize the phrases of APHE (hyperintense enhancement in the arterial phase) and PDPH (hypointense in the portal and delayed phases). To identify more essential diagnostic evidences, we used the traditional rule-based NLP methods for the extraction of radiological features. APHE, PDPH, and other extracted radiological features were used to design a computer-aided liver cancer diagnosis framework by random forest.ResultsThe BERT-BiLSTM-CRF predicted the phrases of APHE and PDPH with an F1 score of 98.40% and 90.67%, respectively. The prediction model using combined features had a higher performance (F1 score, 88.55%) than those using APHE and PDPH (84.88%) or other extracted radiological features (83.52%). APHE and PDPH were the top 2 essential features for liver cancer diagnosis.ConclusionsThis work was a comprehensive NLP study, wherein we identified evidences for the diagnosis of liver cancer from Chinese radiology reports, considering both clinical knowledge and radiology findings. The BERT-based deep learning method for the extraction of diagnostic evidence achieved state-of-the-art performance. The high performance proves the feasibility of the BERT-BiLSTM-CRF model in information extraction from Chinese radiology reports. The findings of our study suggest that the deep learning-based method for automatically identifying evidences for diagnosis can be extended to other types of Chinese clinical texts.

Project description:BACKGROUND:Doctors must care for many patients simultaneously, and it is time-consuming to find and examine all patients' medical histories. Discharge diagnoses provide hospital staff with sufficient information to enable handling multiple patients; however, the excessive amount of words in the diagnostic sentences poses problems. Deep learning may be an effective solution to overcome this problem, but the use of such a heavy model may also add another obstacle to systems with limited computing resources. OBJECTIVE:We aimed to build a diagnoses-extractive summarization model for hospital information systems and provide a service that can be operated even with limited computing resources. METHODS:We used a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based structure with a two-stage training method based on 258,050 discharge diagnoses obtained from the National Taiwan University Hospital Integrated Medical Database, and the highlighted extractive summaries written by experienced doctors were labeled. The model size was reduced using a character-level token, the number of parameters was decreased from 108,523,714 to 963,496, and the model was pretrained using random mask characters in the discharge diagnoses and International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems sets. We then fine-tuned the model using summary labels and cleaned up the prediction results by averaging all probabilities for entire words to prevent character level-induced fragment words. Model performance was evaluated against existing models BERT, BioBERT, and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) using the Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) L score, and a questionnaire website was built to collect feedback from more doctors for each summary proposal. RESULTS:The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve values of the summary proposals were 0.928, 0.941, 0.899, and 0.947 for BERT, BioBERT, LSTM, and the proposed model (AlphaBERT), respectively. The ROUGE-L scores were 0.697, 0.711, 0.648, and 0.693 for BERT, BioBERT, LSTM, and AlphaBERT, respectively. The mean (SD) critique scores from doctors were 2.232 (0.832), 2.134 (0.877), 2.207 (0.844), 1.927 (0.910), and 2.126 (0.874) for reference-by-doctor labels, BERT, BioBERT, LSTM, and AlphaBERT, respectively. Based on the paired t test, there was a statistically significant difference in LSTM compared to the reference (P<.001), BERT (P=.001), BioBERT (P<.001), and AlphaBERT (P=.002), but not in the other models. CONCLUSIONS:Use of character-level tokens in a BERT model can greatly decrease the model size without significantly reducing performance for diagnoses summarization. A well-developed deep-learning model will enhance doctors' abilities to manage patients and promote medical studies by providing the capability to use extensive unstructured free-text notes.

Project description:BackgroundGiven the increasing number of people suffering from tinnitus, the accurate categorization of patients with actionable reports is attractive in assisting clinical decision making. However, this process requires experienced physicians and significant human labor. Natural language processing (NLP) has shown great potential in big data analytics of medical texts; yet, its application to domain-specific analysis of radiology reports is limited.ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to propose a novel approach in classifying actionable radiology reports of tinnitus patients using bidirectional encoder representations from transformer BERT-based models and evaluate the benefits of in domain pre-training (IDPT) along with a sequence adaptation strategy.MethodsA total of 5864 temporal bone computed tomography(CT) reports are labeled by two experienced radiologists as follows: (1) normal findings without notable lesions; (2) notable lesions but uncorrelated to tinnitus; and (3) at least one lesion considered as potential cause of tinnitus. We then constructed a framework consisting of deep learning (DL) neural networks and self-supervised BERT models. A tinnitus domain-specific corpus is used to pre-train the BERT model to further improve its embedding weights. In addition, we conducted an experiment to evaluate multiple groups of max sequence length settings in BERT to reduce the excessive quantity of calculations. After a comprehensive comparison of all metrics, we determined the most promising approach through the performance comparison of F1-scores and AUC values.ResultsIn the first experiment, the BERT finetune model achieved a more promising result (AUC-0.868, F1-0.760) compared with that of the Word2Vec-based models(AUC-0.767, F1-0.733) on validation data. In the second experiment, the BERT in-domain pre-training model (AUC-0.948, F1-0.841) performed significantly better than the BERT based model(AUC-0.868, F1-0.760). Additionally, in the variants of BERT fine-tuning models, Mengzi achieved the highest AUC of 0.878 (F1-0.764). Finally, we found that the BERT max-sequence-length of 128 tokens achieved an AUC of 0.866 (F1-0.736), which is almost equal to the BERT max-sequence-length of 512 tokens (AUC-0.868,F1-0.760).ConclusionIn conclusion, we developed a reliable BERT-based framework for tinnitus diagnosis from Chinese radiology reports, along with a sequence adaptation strategy to reduce computational resources while maintaining accuracy. The findings could provide a reference for NLP development in Chinese radiology reports.

Dataset Information

Adapting Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to Assess Clinical Semantic Textual Similarity: Algorithm Development and Validation Study.

Background

Objective

Methods

Results

Conclusions

Publications

Adapting Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to Assess Clinical Semantic Textual Similarity: Algorithm Development and Validation Study.

Similar Datasets

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