A Deep Learning Architecture for De-identification of Patient Notes: Implementation and Evaluation
This addresses the problem of protecting patient privacy in clinical data for healthcare and research, but is incremental as it builds on existing NLP advances.
The paper tackled de-identification of patient notes by developing a deep learning architecture that achieved state-of-the-art performance on two gold standard datasets, with faster convergence than other systems.
De-identification is the process of removing 18 protected health information (PHI) from clinical notes in order for the text to be considered not individually identifiable. Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) has allowed for the use of deep learning techniques for the task of de-identification. In this paper, we present a deep learning architecture that builds on the latest NLP advances by incorporating deep contextualized word embeddings and variational drop out Bi-LSTMs. We test this architecture on two gold standard datasets and show that the architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on both data sets while also converging faster than other systems without the use of dictionaries or other knowledge sources.