Automatic International Classification of Diseases Coding via Note-Code Interaction Network with Denoising Mechanism

J Comput Biol. 2023 Aug;30(8):912-925. doi: 10.1089/cmb.2023.0079.

Abstract

Clinical notes are comprehensive files containing explicit information about a patient's visit. However, accurately assigning medical codes from clinical documents can be a persistent challenge due to the complexity of clinical data and the vast range of medical codes. Moreover, the large volume of medical records, the noisy medical records, and the uneven quality of coders all negatively impact the quality of the final codes. Deep learning technology has recently been integrated into automatic International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding tasks to improve accuracy. Nevertheless, the imbalanced class problem, the complexness of code associations, and the noise in lengthy records still restrict the advancement of ICD coding tasks in deep learning. Thus, we present the Note-code Interaction Denoising Network (NIDN) that employs the self-attention mechanism to pull critical semantic features in electronic medical records (EMRs). Our model utilizes the label attention mechanism for retaining code-specific text expression. We introduce Clinical Classifications Software coding for multitask learning, capturing the functional relationships of medical coding to oblige in model prediction. To minimize the impact of noise on model prediction and improve the label distribution imbalance, a denoising module is introduced to filter noise. Our practical consequences indicate that the model NIDN exceeds competitive models on a third version of Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care data set.

Keywords: attention mechanism; automatic ICD coding; denoising module; multitask learning.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Automation
  • Electronic Health Records*
  • Humans
  • International Classification of Diseases*