Coherence-based Modeling of Clinical Concepts Inferred from Heterogeneous Clinical Notes for ICU Patient Risk Stratification

Tushaar Gangavarapu, Gokul S Krishnan, Sowmya Kamath S


Abstract
In hospitals, critical care patients are often susceptible to various complications that adversely affect their morbidity and mortality. Digitized patient data from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) can be utilized to facilitate risk stratification accurately and provide prioritized care. Existing clinical decision support systems are heavily reliant on the structured nature of the EHRs. However, the valuable patient-specific data contained in unstructured clinical notes are often manually transcribed into EHRs. The prolific use of extensive medical jargon, heterogeneity, sparsity, rawness, inconsistent abbreviations, and complex structure of the clinical notes poses significant challenges, and also results in a loss of information during the manual conversion process. In this work, we employ two coherence-based topic modeling approaches to model the free-text in the unstructured clinical nursing notes and capture its semantic textual features with the emphasis on human interpretability. Furthermore, we present FarSight, a long-term aggregation mechanism intended to detect the onset of disease with the earliest recorded symptoms and infections. We utilize the predictive capabilities of deep neural models for the clinical task of risk stratification through ICD-9 code group prediction. Our experimental validation on MIMIC-III (v1.4) database underlined the efficacy of FarSight with coherence-based topic modeling, in extracting discriminative clinical features from the unstructured nursing notes. The proposed approach achieved a superior predictive performance when benchmarked against the structured EHR data based state-of-the-art model, with an improvement of 11.50% in AUPRC and 1.16% in AUROC.
Anthology ID:
K19-1095
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1012–1022
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1095
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K19-1095
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tushaar Gangavarapu, Gokul S Krishnan, and Sowmya Kamath S. 2019. Coherence-based Modeling of Clinical Concepts Inferred from Heterogeneous Clinical Notes for ICU Patient Risk Stratification. In Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pages 1012–1022, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Coherence-based Modeling of Clinical Concepts Inferred from Heterogeneous Clinical Notes for ICU Patient Risk Stratification (Gangavarapu et al., CoNLL 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/K19-1095.pdf
Poster:
 K19-1095.Poster.pdf