# Extracting Physiological Numeric Values from French Pediatric ICU Notes: A Multi-Objective Representation Learning Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10171 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10171/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2024.

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

- [Multi-objective Representation for Numbers in Clinical Narratives: A CamemBERT-Bio-Based Alternative to Large-Scale LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18448/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Numeric values in clinical narratives, such as heart rate, oxygen saturation, and pressure gradients, carry diagnostic meaning that Transformer models trained on generic text do not capture. Objective: We categorize numerical values in French pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) notes into eight physiological categories using CamemBERT-bio, under two constraints that make large-scale LLMs impractical: only 1,072 real, annotated clinical samples are available for this rare, single-site condition, and training must run on GPUs shared concurrently with other hospital workloads rather than a dedicated cluster. Methods: We compare fine-tuning CamemBERT-bio with Label Embedding for Self-Attention (LESA) against combining LESA with Xval, a magnitude-aware number embedding, under a multi-objective training loss. Results: Standard fine-tuning did not improve F1 score, but CamemBERT-bio + LESA raised it by over 13%, and adding Xval matched this gain while approaching GPT-4's performance. Conclusion: LESA and Xval let a compact encoder achieve reliable physiological value extraction under limited real data and shared hospital compute, offering a practical alternative to large-scale LLMs. Significance: Under limited-data and shared-compute constraints, this compact BERT-based language model remains effective without the resource trade-offs of trillion-parameter LLMs.