Clinical concept normalization with a hybrid natural language processing system combining multilevel matching and machine learning ranking

Abstract

Objective: Normalizing clinical mentions to concepts in standardized medical terminologies, in general, is challenging due to the complexity and variety of the terms in narrative medical records. In this article, we introduce our work on a clinical natural language processing (NLP) system to automatically normalize clinical mentions to concept unique identifier in the Unified Medical Language System. This work was part of the 2019 n2c2 (National NLP Clinical Challenges) Shared-Task and Workshop on Clinical Concept Normalization. Materials and Methods: We developed a hybrid clinical NLP system that combines a generic multilevel matching framework, customizable matching components, and machine learning ranking systems. We explored 2 machine leaning ranking systems based on either ensemble of various similarity features extracted from pretrained encoders or a Siamese attention network, targeting at efficient and fast semantic searching/ranking. Besides, we also evaluated the performance of a general-purpose clinical NLP system based on Unstructured Information Management Architecture. Results: The systems were evaluated as part of the 2019 n2c2 challenge, and our original best system in the challenge obtained an accuracy of 0.8101, ranked fifth in the challenge. The improved system with newly designed machine learning ranking based on Siamese attention network improved the accuracy to 0.8209. Conclusions: We demonstrate the successful practice of combining multilevel matching and machine learning ranking for clinical concept normalization. Our results indicate the capability and interpretability of our proposed approach, as well as the limitation, suggesting the opportunities of achieving better performance by combining general clinical NLP systems.