Automated Detection of Invasive Fungal Infections in Clinical Reports Using Medical Language Models.

Journal: Studies in health technology and informatics
Published Date:

Abstract

Invasive fungal infections (IFIs) pose significant risks to patients with weakened immune systems, requiring timely detection. To improve IFI detection from clinical reports, we explore the value of recent advances in NLP techniques for this task, including transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) and generative large language models (LLMs). Experimental results show these methods are more effective for IFI detection than prior approaches, with a hybrid approach missing only one positive case over a public benchmark dataset, CHIFIR. These findings highlight the value of modern NLP methods, and the utility of combining diverse approaches.

Authors

  • Wei Han
    Department of Pharmacology, The Key Laboratory of Neural and Vascular Biology, The Key Laboratory of New Drug Pharmacology and Toxicology, Ministry of Education, Collaborative Innovation Center of Hebei Province for Mechanism, Diagnosis and Treatment of Neuropsychiatric Diseases, Hebei Medical University, Shijiazhuang, Hebei, China.
  • David Martinez
    The University of Melbourne, Australia.
  • Vlada Rozova
    School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3052, Australia.
  • Lawrence Cavedon
    School of Science, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
  • Anna Khanina
    National Centre for Infections in Cancer, Melbourne, Australia.
  • Leon J Worth
    National Centre for Infections in Cancer, Melbourne, Australia.
  • Monica A Slavin
    National Centre for Infection in Cancer, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne, Australia.
  • Karin A Thursky
    National Centre for Infections in Cancer, Melbourne, Australia.
  • Karin Verspoor
    Dept of Computing and Information Systems, School of Engineering, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.