An Ensemble Approach for Automatic Structuring of Radiology Reports

Morteza Pourreza Shahri, Amir Tahmasebi, Bingyang Ye, Henghui Zhu, Javed Aslam, Timothy Ferris


Abstract
Automatic structuring of electronic medical records is of high demand for clinical workflow solutions to facilitate extraction, storage, and querying of patient care information. However, developing a scalable solution is extremely challenging, specifically for radiology reports, as most healthcare institutes use either no template or department/institute specific templates. Moreover, radiologists’ reporting style varies from one to another as sentences are written in a telegraphic format and do not follow general English grammar rules. In this work, we present an ensemble method that consolidates the predictions of three models, capturing various attributes of textual information for automatic labeling of sentences with section labels. These three models are: 1) Focus Sentence model, capturing context of the target sentence; 2) Surrounding Context model, capturing the neighboring context of the target sentence; and finally, 3) Formatting/Layout model, aimed at learning report formatting cues. We utilize Bi-directional LSTMs, followed by sentence encoders, to acquire the context. Furthermore, we define several features that incorporate the structure of reports. We compare our proposed approach against multiple baselines and state-of-the-art approaches on a proprietary dataset as well as 100 manually annotated radiology notes from the MIMIC-III dataset, which we are making publicly available. Our proposed approach significantly outperforms other approaches by achieving 97.1% accuracy.
Anthology ID:
2020.clinicalnlp-1.28
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Anna Rumshisky, Kirk Roberts, Steven Bethard, Tristan Naumann
Venue:
ClinicalNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
249–258
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.clinicalnlp-1.28
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.clinicalnlp-1.28
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Morteza Pourreza Shahri, Amir Tahmasebi, Bingyang Ye, Henghui Zhu, Javed Aslam, and Timothy Ferris. 2020. An Ensemble Approach for Automatic Structuring of Radiology Reports. In Proceedings of the 3rd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 249–258, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Ensemble Approach for Automatic Structuring of Radiology Reports (Pourreza Shahri et al., ClinicalNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.clinicalnlp-1.28.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939816
Data
MIMIC-III