Negation recognition in clinical natural language processing using a combination of the NegEx algorithm and a convolutional neural network.
Journal:
BMC medical informatics and decision making
Published Date:
Oct 13, 2023
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Important clinical information of patients is present in unstructured free-text fields of Electronic Health Records (EHRs). While this information can be extracted using clinical Natural Language Processing (cNLP), the recognition of negation modifiers represents an important challenge. A wide range of cNLP applications have been developed to detect the negation of medical entities in clinical free-text, however, effective solutions for languages other than English are scarce. This study aimed at developing a solution for negation recognition in Spanish EHRs based on a combination of a customized rule-based NegEx layer and a convolutional neural network (CNN).