Background: Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a long-standing fundamental problem in various research fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and has been practiced in many application scenarios. However, the application results of NER methods in Chinese electronic medical records (EMRs) are not satisfactory, mainly due to the following two problems: (1) Existing methods do not take into account the impact of medical terminology on model recognition performance, resulting in poor model performance. (2) Existing methods do not fully utilize the Chinese language features contained in EMR, resulting in poor model robustness. Therefore, it is imminent to solve these two problems regarding the performance of the NER model for EMRs. Methods: In this paper, a TENER-based radical feature and entity augmentation model for NER in Chinese EMRs is proposed. The TENER model is first used in the pre-training stage to extract deep semantic information from each layer of the feature extractor. In the decoder part, the recognition of medical entity boundary and entity category are divided into two branch tasks. Results: We compare the overall performance of the proposed model with existing models on different datasets using the computed F1 score evaluation metric. The experimental results show that our model achieves the best F1 score of 82.67%, 74.37%, 70.16% on the CCKS2019, ERTCMM, and CEMR data sets. Meanwhile, in the CMeEE challenge, our model surpassed the top-3 with the F1 score of 68.39%. Conclusions: Our proposed model is the first to divide the NER task into a two-branch tasks, entity boundary and types recognition. Firstly, the medical entity dictionary information is integrated into TENER to obtain the feature information of professional terms in Chinese EMRs. Secondly, the features of Chinese radicals in Chinese EMRs extracted by CNN are added to the entity category recognition task. Finally, the effectiveness of the model is validated on four datasets and competitive results are achieved.
16 November 2021 in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
Background: In recent years, with the development of artificial intelligence, the use of deep learning technology for clinical information extraction has become a new trend. Clinical Event Detection (CED) as its subtask has attracted the attention from academia and industry. However, directly applying the advancements in deep learning to CED task often yields unsatisfactory results. The main reasons are due to the following two points: (1) A great number of obscure professional terms in the electronic medical record leads to poor recognition performance of model. (2) The scarcity of datasets required for the task leads to poor model robustness. Therefore, it is urgent to solve these two problems to improve model performance.Methods: This paper proposes a combining data augmentation and domain information with TENER Model for Clinical Event Detection.Results: We use two evaluation metrics to compare the overall performance of the proposed model with the existing model on the 2012 i2b2 challenge dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves the best F1-score of 80.26%, type accuracy of 93% and Span F1-score of 90.33%, and outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.Conclusions: This paper proposes a multi-granularity information fusion encoder-decoder framework, which applies the TENER model to the CED task for the first time. It uses the pre-trained language model (BioBERT) to generate word-level features, solving the problem of a great number of obscure professional terms in the electronic medical record lead to poor recognition performance of model. In addition, this paper proposes a new data augmentation method for sequence labeling tasks, solving the problem of the scarcity of datasets required for the task leads to poor model robustness.
Electronic medical records (EMRs) contain a variety of valuable medical entities and their relations. The extraction of medical entities and their relations has important application value in the structuring of EMR and the development of various types of intelligent assistant medical systems, and hence is a hot issue in intelligent medicine research. In recent years, most research aims to firstly identify entities and then to recognize the relations between the entities, and often suffers from many redundant operations. Furthermore, the challenge remains of identifying overlapping relation triplets along with the entire medical entity boundary and detecting multi-type relations. In this work, we propose a Specific Relation Attention-guided Graph Neural Networks (SRAGNNs) model to jointly extract entities and their relations in Chinese EMR, which uses sentence information and attention-guided graph neural networks to perceive the features of every relation in a sentence and then to extract those relations. In addition, a specific sentence representation is constructed for every relation, and sequence labeling is performed to extract its corresponding head and tail entities. Experiments on a medical evaluation dataset and a manually labeled Chinese EMR dataset show that our model improves the performance of Chinese medical entities and relation extraction.
Background Cardiovascular disease (CVD), as a chronic disease, has been perplexing human beings and is one of the serious diseases endangering life and health. Therefore, using the electronic medical record information of patients to automatically predict CVD has important application value in intelligent auxiliary diagnosis and treatment, and is a hot issue in intelligent medical research. In recent years, attention mechanism has been successfully extended to various tasks of natural language processing. Typically, these methods use attention to focus on a small part of the context and summarize it with a fixed-size vector, coupling attention in time, and/or often forming a uni-directional attention. Methods In this paper, we propose a CVD risk factors powered bi-directional attention (RFPBiA) network, which is a multi-stage hierarchical process, representing information fusion at different granularity levels, and uses the bi-directional attention to obtain the text representation of risk factors without early aggregation. Results The experimental results show that the proposed method can obviously improve the performance of CVD prediction, and the F-score reaches 0.9424, which is better than the existing related methods. Conclusions We propose to extract the risk factors leading to CVD by using the existing mature entity recognition technology, which provides a new idea for disease prediction tasks. Moreover, the memory- less attention mechanism in both directions in our proposed prediction model of RFPBiA can fuse the character sequence and the risk factors contained in the electronic medical record text to predict CVD.