Automatically determining cause of death from verbal autopsy narratives.
Journal:
BMC medical informatics and decision making
Published Date:
Jul 9, 2019
Abstract
BACKGROUND: A verbal autopsy (VA) is a post-hoc written interview report of the symptoms preceding a person's death in cases where no official cause of death (CoD) was determined by a physician. Current leading automated VA coding methods primarily use structured data from VAs to assign a CoD category. We present a method to automatically determine CoD categories from VA free-text narratives alone.