Uncertainty-aware automatic TNM staging classification for [F] Fluorodeoxyglucose PET-CT reports for lung cancer utilising transformer-based language models and multi-task learning.
Journal:
BMC medical informatics and decision making
PMID:
39695672
Abstract
BACKGROUND: [F] Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET-CT is a clinical imaging modality widely used in diagnosing and staging lung cancer. The clinical findings of PET-CT studies are contained within free text reports, which can currently only be categorised by experts manually reading them. Pre-trained transformer-based language models (PLMs) have shown success in extracting complex linguistic features from text. Accordingly, we developed a multi-task 'TNMu' classifier to classify the presence/absence of tumour, node, metastasis ('TNM') findings (as defined by The Eight Edition of TNM Staging for Lung Cancer). This is combined with an uncertainty classification task ('u') to account for studies with ambiguous TNM status.