skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: CCS Explorer: Relevance Prediction, Extractive Summarization, and Named Entity Recognition from Clinical Cohort Studies
Clinical Cohort Studies (CCS) are a great source of documented clinical research. Ideally, a clinical expert will interpret these articles for exploratory analysis ranging from drug discovery for evaluating the efficacy of existing drugs in tackling emerging diseases to the first test of newly developed drugs. However, more than 100 CCS articles are published on PubMed every day. As a result, it can take days for a doctor to find articles and extract relevant information. Can we find a way to quickly sift through the long list of these articles faster and document the crucial takeaways from each of these articles? In this work, we propose CCS Explorer, an end-to-end system for relevance prediction of sentences, extractive summarization, and patient, outcome, and intervention entity detection from CCS. CCS Explorer is packaged in a web-based graphical user interface where the user can provide any disease name. CCS Explorer then extracts and aggregates all relevant information from articles on PubMed based on the results of an automatically generated query produced on the back-end. CCS Explorer fine-tunes pre-trained language models based on transformers with additional layers for each of these tasks. We evaluate the models using two publicly available datasets. CCS Explorer obtains a recall of 80.2%, AUC-ROC of 0.843, and an accuracy of 88.3% on sentence relevance prediction using BioBERT and achieves an average Micro F1-Score of 77.8% on Patient, Intervention, Outcome detection (PIO) using PubMedBERT. Thus, CCS Explorer can reliably extract relevant information to summarize articles, saving time by ∼ 660×.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1944247
PAR ID:
10404583
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
5173 to 5181
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. This work introduces TrialSieve, a novel framework for biomedical information extraction that enhances clinical meta-analysis and drug repurposing. By extending traditional PICO (Patient, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome) methodologies, TrialSieve incorporates hierarchical, treatment group-based graphs, enabling more comprehensive and quantitative comparisons of clinical outcomes. TrialSieve was used to annotate 1609 PubMed abstracts, 170,557 annotations, and 52,638 final spans, incorporating 20 unique annotation categories that capture a diverse range of biomedical entities relevant to systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The performance (accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score) of four natural-language processing (NLP) models (BioLinkBERT, BioBERT, KRISSBERT, PubMedBERT) and the large language model (LLM), GPT-4o, was evaluated using the human-annotated TrialSieve dataset. BioLinkBERT had the best accuracy (0.875) and recall (0.679) for biomedical entity labeling, whereas PubMedBERT had the best precision (0.614) and F1-score (0.639). Error analysis showed that NLP models trained on noisy, human-annotated data can match or, in most cases, surpass human performance. This finding highlights the feasibility of fully automating biomedical information extraction, even when relying on imperfectly annotated datasets. An annotator user study (n = 39) revealed significant (p < 0.05) gains in efficiency and human annotation accuracy with the unique TrialSieve tree-based annotation approach. In summary, TrialSieve provides a foundation to improve automated biomedical information extraction for frontend clinical research. 
    more » « less
  2. Zaza, Gianluca; Gallo, Crescenzio (Ed.)
    (1) Background: With technological advancements, the integration of wireless sensing and artificial intelligence (AI) has significant potential for real-time monitoring and intervention. Wireless sensing devices have been applied to various medical areas for early diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment response. This review focuses on the latest advancements in wireless, AI-incorporated methods applied to clinical medicine. (2) Methods: We conducted a comprehensive search in PubMed, IEEEXplore, Embase, and Scopus for articles that describe AI-incorporated wireless sensing devices for clinical applications. We analyzed the strengths and limitations within their respective medical domains, highlighting the value of wireless sensing in precision medicine, and synthesized the literature to provide areas for future work. (3) Results: We identified 10,691 articles and selected 34 that met our inclusion criteria, focusing on real-world validation of wireless sensing. The findings indicate that these technologies demonstrate significant potential in improving diagnosis, treatment monitoring, and disease prevention. Notably, the use of acoustic signals, channel state information, and radar emerged as leading techniques, showing promising results in detecting physiological changes without invasive procedures. (4) Conclusions: This review highlights the role of wireless sensing in clinical care and suggests a growing trend towards integrating these technologies into routine healthcare, particularly patient monitoring and diagnostic support. 
    more » « less
  3. The large amount of time clinicians spend sifting through patient notes and documenting in electronic health records (EHRs) is a leading cause of clinician burnout. By proactively and dynamically retrieving relevant notes during the documentation process, we can reduce the effort required to find relevant patient history. In this work, we conceptualize the use of EHR audit logs for machine learning as a source of supervision of note relevance in a specific clinical context, at a particular point in time. Our evaluation focuses on the dynamic retrieval in the emergency department, a high acuity setting with unique patterns of information retrieval and note writing. We show that our methods can achieve an AUC of 0.963 for predicting which notes will be read in an individual note writing session. We additionally conduct a user study with several clinicians and find that our framework can help clinicians retrieve relevant information more efficiently. Demonstrating that our framework and methods can perform well in this demanding setting is a promising proof of concept that they will translate to other clinical settings and data modalities (e.g., labs, medications, imaging). 
    more » « less
  4. Sepsis is a dysregulated host response to infection with high mortality and morbidity. Early detection and intervention have been shown to improve patient outcomes, but existing computational models relying on structured electronic health record data often miss contextual information from unstructured clinical notes. This study introduces COMPOSER-LLM, an open-source large language model (LLM) integrated with the COMPOSER model to enhance early sepsis prediction. For high-uncertainty predictions, the LLM extracts additional context to assess sepsis-mimics, improving accuracy. Evaluated on 2500 patient encounters, COMPOSER-LLM achieved a sensitivity of 72.1%, positive predictive value of 52.9%, F-1 score of 61.0%, and 0.0087 false alarms per patient hour, outperforming the standalone COMPOSER model. Prospective validation yielded similar results. Manual chart review found 62% of false positives had bacterial infections, demonstrating potential clinical utility. Our findings suggest that integrating LLMs with traditional models can enhance predictive performance by leveraging unstructured data, representing a significant advance in healthcare analytics. 
    more » « less
  5. Abstract Neuropsychiatric disorders pose a high societal cost, but their treatment is hindered by lack of objective outcomes and fidelity metrics. AI technologies and specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP) have emerged as tools to study mental health interventions (MHI) at the level of their constituent conversations. However, NLP’s potential to address clinical and research challenges remains unclear. We therefore conducted a pre-registered systematic review of NLP-MHI studies using PRISMA guidelines (osf.io/s52jh) to evaluate their models, clinical applications, and to identify biases and gaps. Candidate studies (n = 19,756), including peer-reviewed AI conference manuscripts, were collected up to January 2023 through PubMed, PsycINFO, Scopus, Google Scholar, and ArXiv. A total of 102 articles were included to investigate their computational characteristics (NLP algorithms, audio features, machine learning pipelines, outcome metrics), clinical characteristics (clinical ground truths, study samples, clinical focus), and limitations. Results indicate a rapid growth of NLP MHI studies since 2019, characterized by increased sample sizes and use of large language models. Digital health platforms were the largest providers of MHI data. Ground truth for supervised learning models was based on clinician ratings (n = 31), patient self-report (n = 29) and annotations by raters (n = 26). Text-based features contributed more to model accuracy than audio markers. Patients’ clinical presentation (n = 34), response to intervention (n = 11), intervention monitoring (n = 20), providers’ characteristics (n = 12), relational dynamics (n = 14), and data preparation (n = 4) were commonly investigated clinical categories. Limitations of reviewed studies included lack of linguistic diversity, limited reproducibility, and population bias. A research framework is developed and validated (NLPxMHI) to assist computational and clinical researchers in addressing the remaining gaps in applying NLP to MHI, with the goal of improving clinical utility, data access, and fairness. 
    more » « less