Clinical Concept Normalization on Medical Records Using Word Embeddings and Heuristics.

Journal: Studies in health technology and informatics
Published Date:

Abstract

Electronic health records contain valuable information on patients' clinical history in the form of free text. Manually analyzing millions of these documents is unfeasible and automatic natural language processing methods are essential for efficiently exploiting these data. Within this, normalization of clinical entities, where the aim is to link entity mentions to reference vocabularies, is of utmost importance to successfully extract knowledge from clinical narratives. In this paper we present sieve-based models combined with heuristics and word embeddings and present results of our participation in the 2019 n2c2 (National NLP Clinical Challenges) shared-task on clinical concept normalization.

Authors

  • João Figueira Silva
    DETI/IEETA, University of Aveiro, Portugal.
  • Rui Antunes
    .
  • João Rafael Almeida
    DETI/IEETA, University of Aveiro, Portugal.
  • Sérgio Matos
    Department of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics and Institute of Electronics and Telematics Engineering of Aveiro, University of Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal. aleixomatos@ua.pt.