Multi-Label Classification of Patient Notes a Case Study on ICD Code Assignment
This addresses the challenge of efficient and accurate diagnosis coding in electronic health records, which is incremental but domain-specific.
The paper tackles the problem of automated multi-label ICD code assignment from patient discharge summaries, achieving state-of-the-art results with a Hierarchical Attention-GRU model.
In the context of the Electronic Health Record, automated diagnosis coding of patient notes is a useful task, but a challenging one due to the large number of codes and the length of patient notes. We investigate four models for assigning multiple ICD codes to discharge summaries taken from both MIMIC II and III. We present Hierarchical Attention-GRU (HA-GRU), a hierarchical approach to tag a document by identifying the sentences relevant for each label. HA-GRU achieves state-of-the art results. Furthermore, the learned sentence-level attention layer highlights the model decision process, allows easier error analysis, and suggests future directions for improvement.