Explainable Clinical Decision Support from Text

Jinyue Feng, Chantal Shaib, Frank Rudzicz


Abstract
Clinical prediction models often use structured variables and provide outcomes that are not readily interpretable by clinicians. Further, free-text medical notes may contain information not immediately available in structured variables. We propose a hierarchical CNN-transformer model with explicit attention as an interpretable, multi-task clinical language model, which achieves an AUROC of 0.75 and 0.78 on sepsis and mortality prediction, respectively. We also explore the relationships between learned features from structured and unstructured variables using projection-weighted canonical correlation analysis. Finally, we outline a protocol to evaluate model usability in a clinical decision support context. From domain-expert evaluations, our model generates informative rationales that have promising real-life applications.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.115
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1478–1489
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.115
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.115
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jinyue Feng, Chantal Shaib, and Frank Rudzicz. 2020. Explainable Clinical Decision Support from Text. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 1478–1489, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Explainable Clinical Decision Support from Text (Feng et al., EMNLP 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2020.emnlp-main.115.pdf
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 2020.emnlp-main.115.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
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