Unsupervised Neural Network for Automated Classification of Surgical Urgency Levels in Medical Transcriptions
This addresses the challenge of limited labeled data for surgical prioritization in healthcare, providing a scalable solution to enhance operational efficiency and patient outcomes, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods like BioClinicalBERT and clustering algorithms.
The study tackled the problem of classifying surgical procedures by urgency levels from medical transcriptions using an unsupervised neural network approach, achieving robust performance with metrics like accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score that demonstrate strong generalization on unseen data.
Efficient classification of surgical procedures by urgency is paramount to optimize patient care and resource allocation within healthcare systems. This study introduces an unsupervised neural network approach to automatically categorize surgical transcriptions into three urgency levels: immediate, urgent, and elective. Leveraging BioClinicalBERT, a domain-specific language model, surgical transcripts are transformed into high-dimensional embeddings that capture their semantic nuances. These embeddings are subsequently clustered using both K-means and Deep Embedding Clustering (DEC) algorithms, in which DEC demonstrates superior performance in the formation of cohesive and well-separated clusters. To ensure clinical relevance and accuracy, the clustering results undergo validation through the Modified Delphi Method, which involves expert review and refinement. Following validation, a neural network that integrates Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) layers with BioClinicalBERT embeddings is developed for classification tasks. The model is rigorously evaluated using cross-validation and metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, which achieve robust performance and demonstrate strong generalization capabilities on unseen data. This unsupervised framework not only addresses the challenge of limited labeled data but also provides a scalable and reliable solution for real-time surgical prioritization, which ultimately enhances operational efficiency and patient outcomes in dynamic medical environments.