# MKE-Coder: Multi-Axial Knowledge with Evidence Verification in ICD Coding for Chinese EMRs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14916 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14916/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
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- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
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- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
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- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
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- [How Many Data Points is a Prompt Worth?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08493/) (2021)
- [Knowledgeable Prompt-tuning: Incorporating Knowledge into Prompt Verbalizer for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02035/) (2021)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Graphs with Heterophily: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07082/) (2022)
- [Code Synonyms Do Matter: Multiple Synonyms Matching Network for Automatic ICD Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01515/) (2022)
- [A Label Attention Model for ICD Coding from Clinical Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06351/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Injected Prompt Based Fine-tuning for Multi-label Few-shot ICD Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03304/) (2022)
- [Does the Magic of BERT Apply to Medical Code Assignment? A Quantitative Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06511/) (2021)
- [BERT-XML: Large Scale Automated ICD Coding Using BERT Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03685/) (2020)
- [Towards BERT-based Automatic ICD Coding: Limitations and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06709/) (2021)
- [CoRelation: Boosting Automatic ICD Coding Through Contextualized Code Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15700/) (2024)
- [Accurate and Well-Calibrated ICD Code Assignment Through Attention Over Diverse Label Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03172/) (2024)
- [BERT for Long Documents: A Case Study of Automated ICD Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02519/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The task of automatically coding the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) in the medical field has been well-established and has received much attention. Automatic coding of the ICD in the medical field has been successful in English but faces challenges when dealing with Chinese electronic medical records (EMRs). The first issue lies in the difficulty of extracting disease code-related information from Chinese EMRs, primarily due to the concise writing style and specific internal structure of the EMRs. The second problem is that previous methods have failed to leverage the disease-based multi-axial knowledge and lack of association with the corresponding clinical evidence. This paper introduces a novel framework called MKE-Coder: Multi-axial Knowledge with Evidence verification in ICD coding for Chinese EMRs. Initially, we identify candidate codes for the diagnosis and categorize each of them into knowledge under four coding axes.Subsequently, we retrieve corresponding clinical evidence from the comprehensive content of EMRs and filter credible evidence through a scoring model. Finally, to ensure the validity of the candidate code, we propose an inference module based on the masked language modeling strategy. This module verifies that all the axis knowledge associated with the candidate code is supported by evidence and provides recommendations accordingly. To evaluate the performance of our framework, we conduct experiments using a large-scale Chinese EMR dataset collected from various hospitals. The experimental results demonstrate that MKE-Coder exhibits significant superiority in the task of automatic ICD coding based on Chinese EMRs. In the practical evaluation of our method within simulated real coding scenarios, it has been demonstrated that our approach significantly aids coders in enhancing both their coding accuracy and speed.
