Clinical Text Summarization with Syntax-Based Negation and Semantic Concept Identification
This work addresses the need for improved clinical workflow by providing a more interpretable summarization method for healthcare professionals, though it is incremental as it builds on existing linguistic and knowledge-based approaches.
The authors tackled the problem of summarizing clinical narrative texts by developing an interpretable method that uses biomedical ontology and constituency trees to identify clinical concepts and negation information, achieving clinically acceptable performance for both tasks.
In the era of clinical information explosion, a good strategy for clinical text summarization is helpful to improve the clinical workflow. The ideal summarization strategy can preserve important information in the informative but less organized, ill-structured clinical narrative texts. Instead of using pure statistical learning approaches, which are difficult to interpret and explain, we utilized knowledge of computational linguistics with human experts-curated biomedical knowledge base to achieve the interpretable and meaningful clinical text summarization. Our research objective is to use the biomedical ontology with semantic information, and take the advantage from the language hierarchical structure, the constituency tree, in order to identify the correct clinical concepts and the corresponding negation information, which is critical for summarizing clinical concepts from narrative text. We achieved the clinically acceptable performance for both negation detection and concept identification, and the clinical concepts with common negated patterns can be identified and negated by the proposed method.