Automatic International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding plays a crucial role in the extraction of relevant information from clinical notes for proper recording and billing. One of the most important directions for boosting the performance of automatic ICD coding is modeling ICD code relations. However, current methods insufficiently model the intricate relationships among ICD codes and often overlook the importance of context in clinical notes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, a contextualized and flexible framework, to enhance the learning of ICD code representations. Our approach, unlike existing methods, employs a dependent learning paradigm that considers the context of clinical notes in modeling all possible code relations. We evaluate our approach on six public ICD coding datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Although pre-training has become a prevalent approach for addressing various biomedical tasks, the current efficacy of pre-trained models is hindered by their reliance on a limited scope of medical sources. This limitation results in data scarcity during pre-training and restricts the range of applicable downstream tasks. In response to these challenges, we develop MedCSP, a new pre-training strategy designed to bridge the gap between multimodal medical sources. MedCSP employs modality-level aggregation to unify patient data within individual sources. Additionally, leveraging temporal information and diagnosis history, MedCSP effectively captures explicit and implicit correlations between patients across different sources. To evaluate the proposed strategy, we conduct comprehensive experiments, where the experiments are based on 6 modalities from 2 real-world medical data sources, and MedCSP is evaluated on 4 tasks against 19 baselines, marking an initial yet essential step towards cross-source modeling in the medical domain.

Pretraining has proven to be a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP), exhibiting remarkable success in various NLP downstream tasks. However, in the medical domain, existing pretrained models on electronic health records (EHR) fail to capture the hierarchical nature of EHR data, limiting their generalization capability across diverse downstream tasks using a single pretrained model. To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces a novel, general, and unified pretraining framework called MedHMP, specifically designed for hierarchically multimodal EHR data. The effectiveness of the proposed MedHMP is demonstrated through experimental results on eight downstream tasks spanning three levels. Comparisons against eighteen baselines further highlight the efficacy of our approach.

Patients with low health literacy usually have difficulty understanding medical jargon and the complex structure of professional medical language. Although some studies are proposed to automatically translate expert language into layperson-understandable language, only a few of them focus on both accuracy and readability aspects simultaneously in the clinical domain. Thus, simplification of the clinical language is still a challenging task, but unfortunately, it is not yet fully addressed in previous work. To benchmark this task, we construct a new dataset named MedLane to support the development and evaluation of automated clinical language simplification approaches. Besides, we propose a new model called DECLARE that follows the human annotation procedure and achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with eight strong baselines. To fairly evaluate the performance, we also propose three specific evaluation metrics. Experimental results demonstrate the utility of the annotated MedLane dataset and the effectiveness of the proposed model DECLARE.