Multiple Sclerosis Severity Classification From Clinical Text

Alister D’Costa, Stefan Denkovski, Michal Malyska, Sae Young Moon, Brandon Rufino, Zhen Yang, Taylor Killian, Marzyeh Ghassemi


Abstract
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic, inflammatory and degenerative neurological disease, which is monitored by a specialist using the Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) and recorded in unstructured text in the form of a neurology consult note. An EDSS measurement contains an overall ‘EDSS’ score and several functional subscores. Typically, expert knowledge is required to interpret consult notes and generate these scores. Previous approaches used limited context length Word2Vec embeddings and keyword searches to predict scores given a consult note, but often failed when scores were not explicitly stated. In this work, we present MS-BERT, the first publicly available transformer model trained on real clinical data other than MIMIC. Next, we present MSBC, a classifier that applies MS-BERT to generate embeddings and predict EDSS and functional subscores. Lastly, we explore combining MSBC with other models through the use of Snorkel to generate scores for unlabelled consult notes. MSBC achieves state-of-the-art performance on all metrics and prediction tasks and outperforms the models generated from the Snorkel ensemble. We improve Macro-F1 by 0.12 (to 0.88) for predicting EDSS and on average by 0.29 (to 0.63) for predicting functional subscores over previous Word2Vec CNN and rule-based approaches.
Anthology ID:
2020.clinicalnlp-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Venue:
ClinicalNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7–23
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.clinicalnlp-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.clinicalnlp-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alister D’Costa, Stefan Denkovski, Michal Malyska, Sae Young Moon, Brandon Rufino, Zhen Yang, Taylor Killian, and Marzyeh Ghassemi. 2020. Multiple Sclerosis Severity Classification From Clinical Text. In Proceedings of the 3rd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 7–23, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multiple Sclerosis Severity Classification From Clinical Text (D’Costa et al., ClinicalNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.clinicalnlp-1.2.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939815
Data
BLUEMIMIC-III