Neural Translation and Automated Recognition of ICD-10 Medical Entities From Natural Language: Model Development and Performance Assessment

Background: The recognition of medical entities from natural language is a ubiquitous problem in the medical field, with applications ranging from medical coding to the analysis of electronic health data for public health. It is, however, a complex task usually requiring human expert intervention, thus making it expansive and time-consuming. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, specifically the rise of deep learning methods, have enabled computers to make efficient decisions on a number of complex problems, with the notable example of neural sequence models and their powerful applications in natural language processing. However, they require a considerable amount of data to learn from, which is typically their main limiting factor. The Centre for Epidemiology on Medical Causes of Death (CepiDc) stores an exhaustive database of death certificates at the French national scale, amounting to several millions of natural language examples provided with their associated human-coded medical entities available to the machine learning practitioner. Objective: The aim of this paper was to investigate the application of deep neural sequence models to the problem of medical entity recognition from natural language. Methods: The investigated data set included every French death certificate from 2011 to 2016. These certificates contain information such as the subject's age, the subject's gender, and the chain of events leading to his or her death, both in French and encoded as International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) medical entities, for a total of around 3 million observations in the data set. The task of automatically recognizing ICD-10 medical entities from the French natural language based chain of events leading to death was then formulated as a type of predictive modeling problem known as a sequence-to-sequence modeling problem. A deep neural network-based model, known as the Transformer, was then slightly adapted and fit to the data set. Its performance was then assessed on an external data set and compared to the current state-of-the-art approach CIs for derived measurements were estimated via bootstrapping. Results: The proposed approach resulted in an F-measure value of 0.952 (95% CI 0.946-0.957), which constitutes a significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art approach and its previously reported F-measure value of 0.825 as assessed on a comparable data set. Such an improvement makes possible a whole field of new applications, from nosologist-level automated coding to temporal harmonization of death statistics. Conclusions: This paper shows that a deep artificial neural network can directly learn from voluminous data sets in order to identify complex relationships between natural language and medical entities, without any explicit prior knowledge. Although not entirely free from mistakes, the derived model constitutes a powerful tool for automated coding of medical entities from medical language with promising potential applications.