Learning to Diagnose: Assimilating Clinical Narratives using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Yuan Ling, Sadid A. Hasan, Vivek Datla, Ashequl Qadir, Kathy Lee, Joey Liu, Oladimeji Farri


Abstract
Clinical diagnosis is a critical and non-trivial aspect of patient care which often requires significant medical research and investigation based on an underlying clinical scenario. This paper proposes a novel approach by formulating clinical diagnosis as a reinforcement learning problem. During training, the reinforcement learning agent mimics the clinician’s cognitive process and learns the optimal policy to obtain the most appropriate diagnoses for a clinical narrative. This is achieved through an iterative search for candidate diagnoses from external knowledge sources via a sentence-by-sentence analysis of the inherent clinical context. A deep Q-network architecture is trained to optimize a reward function that measures the accuracy of the candidate diagnoses. Experiments on the TREC CDS datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our system over various non-reinforcement learning-based systems.
Anthology ID:
I17-1090
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2017
Address:
Taipei, Taiwan
Venue:
IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing
Note:
Pages:
895–905
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/I17-1090
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuan Ling, Sadid A. Hasan, Vivek Datla, Ashequl Qadir, Kathy Lee, Joey Liu, and Oladimeji Farri. 2017. Learning to Diagnose: Assimilating Clinical Narratives using Deep Reinforcement Learning. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 895–905, Taipei, Taiwan. Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Diagnose: Assimilating Clinical Narratives using Deep Reinforcement Learning (Ling et al., IJCNLP 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-xml-comments/I17-1090.pdf