Cédric Gil-Jardiné

Océane Doremus, Ariel Guerra-Adames, Marta Avalos-Fernandez et al.

Faced with the challenges of patient confidentiality and scientific reproducibility, research on machine learning for health is turning towards the conception of synthetic medical databases. This article presents a brief overview of state-of-the-art machine learning methods for generating synthetic tabular and textual data, focusing their application to the automatic classification of trauma mechanisms, followed by our proposed methodology for generating high-quality, synthetic medical records combining tabular and unstructured text data.

Binbin Xu, Cédric Gil-Jardiné, Frantz Thiessard et al.

To build a French national electronic injury surveillance system based on emergency room visits, we aim to develop a coding system to classify their causes from clinical notes in free-text. Supervised learning techniques have shown good results in this area but require a large amount of expert annotated dataset which is time consuming and costly to obtain. We hypothesize that the Natural Language Processing Transformer model incorporating a generative self-supervised pre-training step can significantly reduce the required number of annotated samples for supervised fine-tuning. In this preliminary study, we test our hypothesis in the simplified problem of predicting whether a visit is the consequence of a traumatic event or not from free-text clinical notes. Using fully re-trained GPT-2 models (without OpenAI pre-trained weights), we assess the gain of applying a self-supervised pre-training phase with unlabeled notes prior to the supervised learning task. Results show that the number of data required to achieve a ginve level of performance (AUC>0.95) was reduced by a factor of 10 when applying pre-training. Namely, for 16 times more data, the fully-supervised model achieved an improvement <1% in AUC. To conclude, it is possible to adapt a multi-purpose neural language model such as the GPT-2 to create a powerful tool for classification of free-text notes with only a small number of labeled samples.