Bridging the Code Gap: A Joint Learning Framework across Medical Coding Systems

Geunyeong Jeong, Seokwon Jeong, Juoh Sun, Harksoo Kim


Abstract
Automated Medical Coding (AMC) is the task of automatically converting free-text medical documents into predefined codes according to a specific medical coding system. Although deep learning has significantly advanced AMC, the class imbalance problem remains a significant challenge. To address this issue, most existing methods consider only a single coding system and disregard the potential benefits of reflecting the relevance between different coding systems. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Joint learning framework for Across Medical coding Systems (JAMS), which jointly learns different coding systems through multi-task learning. It learns various representations using a shared encoder and explicitly captures the relationships across these coding systems using the medical code attention network, a modification of the graph attention network. In the experiments on the MIMIC-IV ICD-9 and MIMIC-IV ICD-10 datasets, connected through General Equivalence Mappings, JAMS improved the performance consistently regardless of the backbone models. This result demonstrates its model-agnostic characteristic, which is not constrained by specific model structures. Notably, JAMS significantly improved the performance of low-frequency codes. Our analysis shows that these performance gains are due to the connections between the codes of the different coding systems.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.227
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
2520–2525
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.227
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Geunyeong Jeong, Seokwon Jeong, Juoh Sun, and Harksoo Kim. 2024. Bridging the Code Gap: A Joint Learning Framework across Medical Coding Systems. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 2520–2525, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Bridging the Code Gap: A Joint Learning Framework across Medical Coding Systems (Jeong et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2024.lrec-main.227.pdf