# Using Deep Learning to Identify Patients with Cognitive Impairment in Electronic Health Records

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.09115 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09115/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Publicly Available Clinical BERT Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03323/) (2019)
- [Scalable and accurate deep learning for electronic health records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07860/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [NeuraHealth: An Automated Screening Pipeline to Detect Undiagnosed Cognitive Impairment in Electronic Health Records with Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00478/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dementia is a neurodegenerative disorder that causes cognitive decline and affects more than 50 million people worldwide. Dementia is under-diagnosed by healthcare professionals - only one in four people who suffer from dementia are diagnosed. Even when a diagnosis is made, it may not be entered as a structured International Classification of Diseases (ICD) diagnosis code in a patient's charts. Information relevant to cognitive impairment (CI) is often found within electronic health records (EHR), but manual review of clinician notes by experts is both time consuming and often prone to errors. Automated mining of these notes presents an opportunity to label patients with cognitive impairment in EHR data. We developed natural language processing (NLP) tools to identify patients with cognitive impairment and demonstrate that linguistic context enhances performance for the cognitive impairment classification task. We fine-tuned our attention based deep learning model, which can learn from complex language structures, and substantially improved accuracy (0.93) relative to a baseline NLP model (0.84). Further, we show that deep learning NLP can successfully identify dementia patients without dementia-related ICD codes or medications.