Multi-task deep neural networks for automated extraction of primary site and laterality information from cancer pathology reports

Abstract

Automated annotation of free-text cancer pathology reports is a critical challenge for cancer registries and the national cancer surveillance program. In this paper, we investigated deep neural networks (DNNs) for automated extraction of the primary cancer site and its laterality, two fundamental targets of cancer reporting. Our experiments showed that single-task DNNs are capable of extracting information with higher precision and recall than traditional classification methods for the more challenging target. Furthermore, a multi-task learning DNN resulted in further performance improvement. This preliminary study, indicate the strong potential for multi-task deep neural networks to extract cancer-relevant information from free-text pathology reports.