Code Synonyms Do Matter: Multiple Synonyms Matching Network for Automatic ICD Coding
This work addresses the challenge of assigning accurate disease codes to electronic medical records, which is incremental as it builds on existing label attention methods by incorporating synonyms.
The paper tackled the problem of automatic ICD coding by leveraging code synonyms to improve code representation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the MIMIC-III dataset.
Automatic ICD coding is defined as assigning disease codes to electronic medical records (EMRs). Existing methods usually apply label attention with code representations to match related text snippets. Unlike these works that model the label with the code hierarchy or description, we argue that the code synonyms can provide more comprehensive knowledge based on the observation that the code expressions in EMRs vary from their descriptions in ICD. By aligning codes to concepts in UMLS, we collect synonyms of every code. Then, we propose a multiple synonyms matching network to leverage synonyms for better code representation learning, and finally help the code classification. Experiments on the MIMIC-III dataset show that our proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.