Converging Semantic Knowledge and Deep Learning for Medical Coding

Abstract

The field of medical coding enables to assign codes of medical classifications such as the international classification of diseases (ICD) to clinical notes, which are medical reports about patients' conditions written by healthcare professionals in natural language. These texts potentially include medical terms that define diagnosis, symptoms, drugs, treatments, etc., and the use of spontaneous language is challenging for automatic processing. Medical coding is usually performed manually by human medical coders becoming time-consuming and prone to errors. This research aims at developing new approaches that combine deep learning elements together with traditional technologies. A semantic-based proposal supported by a proprietary knowledge graph (KG), neural network implementations, and an ensemble model to resolve the medical coding are presented. A comparative discussion between the proposals where the advantages and disadvantages of each one is analysed. To evaluate approaches, two main corpus have been used: MIMIC-III and private de-identified clinical notes.