Neural Natural Language Processing for Unstructured Data in Electronic Health Records: a Review
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Abstract (arXiv)
Electronic health records (EHRs), digital collections of patient healthcare events and observations, are ubiquitous in medicine and critical to healthcare delivery, operations, and research. Despite this central role, EHRs are notoriously difficult to process automatically. Well over half of the information stored within EHRs is in the form of unstructured text (e.g. provider notes, operation reports) and remains largely untapped for secondary use. Recently, however, newer neural network and deep learning approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) have made considerable advances, outperforming traditional statistical and rule-based systems on a variety of tasks. In this survey paper, we summarize current neural NLP methods for EHR applications. We focus on a broad scope of tasks, namely, classification and prediction, word embeddings, extraction, generation, and other topics such as question answering, phenotyping, knowledge graphs, medical dialogue, multilinguality, interpretability, etc.
Key facts. Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 138 of its 301 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2021.
Builds on
138 of 301 references.
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