Classifying cancer pathology reports with hierarchical self-attention networks.

We introduce a deep learning architecture, hierarchical self-attention networks (HiSANs), designed for classifying pathology reports and show how its unique architecture leads to a new state-of-the-art in accuracy, faster training, and clear interpretability. We evaluate performance on a corpus of 374,899 pathology reports obtained from the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program. Each pathology report is associated with five clinical classification tasks - site, laterality, behavior, histology, and grade. We compare the performance of the HiSAN against other machine learning and deep learning approaches commonly used on medical text data - Naive Bayes, logistic regression, convolutional neural networks, and hierarchical attention networks (the previous state-of-the-art). We show that HiSANs are superior to other machine learning and deep learning text classifiers in both accuracy and macro F-score across all five classification tasks. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art, hierarchical attention networks, HiSANs not only are an order of magnitude faster to train, but also achieve about 1% better relative accuracy and 5% better relative macro F-score.

Gao S ，Qiu JX ，Alawad M ，Hinkle JD ，Schaefferkoetter N ，Yoon HJ ，Christian B ，Fearn PA ，Penberthy L ，Wu XC ，Coyle L ，Tourassi G ，Ramanathan A ... -  《-》

Automatic extraction of cancer registry reportable information from free-text pathology reports using multitask convolutional neural networks.

We implement 2 different multitask learning (MTL) techniques, hard parameter sharing and cross-stitch, to train a word-level convolutional neural network (CNN) specifically designed for automatic extraction of cancer data from unstructured text in pathology reports. We show the importance of learning related information extraction (IE) tasks leveraging shared representations across the tasks to achieve state-of-the-art performance in classification accuracy and computational efficiency. Multitask CNN (MTCNN) attempts to tackle document information extraction by learning to extract multiple key cancer characteristics simultaneously. We trained our MTCNN to perform 5 information extraction tasks: (1) primary cancer site (65 classes), (2) laterality (4 classes), (3) behavior (3 classes), (4) histological type (63 classes), and (5) histological grade (5 classes). We evaluated the performance on a corpus of 95 231 pathology documents (71 223 unique tumors) obtained from the Louisiana Tumor Registry. We compared the performance of the MTCNN models against single-task CNN models and 2 traditional machine learning approaches, namely support vector machine (SVM) and random forest classifier (RFC). MTCNNs offered superior performance across all 5 tasks in terms of classification accuracy as compared with the other machine learning models. Based on retrospective evaluation, the hard parameter sharing and cross-stitch MTCNN models correctly classified 59.04% and 57.93% of the pathology reports respectively across all 5 tasks. The baseline models achieved 53.68% (CNN), 46.37% (RFC), and 36.75% (SVM). Based on prospective evaluation, the percentages of correctly classified cases across the 5 tasks were 60.11% (hard parameter sharing), 58.13% (cross-stitch), 51.30% (single-task CNN), 42.07% (RFC), and 35.16% (SVM). Moreover, hard parameter sharing MTCNNs outperformed the other models in computational efficiency by using about the same number of trainable parameters as a single-task CNN. The hard parameter sharing MTCNN offers superior classification accuracy for automated coding support of pathology documents across a wide range of cancers and multiple information extraction tasks while maintaining similar training and inference time as those of a single task-specific model.

Alawad M ，Gao S ，Qiu JX ，Yoon HJ ，Blair Christian J ，Penberthy L ，Mumphrey B ，Wu XC ，Coyle L ，Tourassi G ... -  《-》

Hierarchical attention networks for information extraction from cancer pathology reports.

We explored how a deep learning (DL) approach based on hierarchical attention networks (HANs) can improve model performance for multiple information extraction tasks from unstructured cancer pathology reports compared to conventional methods that do not sufficiently capture syntactic and semantic contexts from free-text documents. Data for our analyses were obtained from 942 deidentified pathology reports collected by the National Cancer Institute Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program. The HAN was implemented for 2 information extraction tasks: (1) primary site, matched to 12 International Classification of Diseases for Oncology topography codes (7 breast, 5 lung primary sites), and (2) histological grade classification, matched to G1-G4. Model performance metrics were compared to conventional machine learning (ML) approaches including naive Bayes, logistic regression, support vector machine, random forest, and extreme gradient boosting, and other DL models, including a recurrent neural network (RNN), a recurrent neural network with attention (RNN w/A), and a convolutional neural network. Our results demonstrate that for both information tasks, HAN performed significantly better compared to the conventional ML and DL techniques. In particular, across the 2 tasks, the mean micro and macro F-scores for the HAN with pretraining were (0.852,0.708), compared to naive Bayes (0.518, 0.213), logistic regression (0.682, 0.453), support vector machine (0.634, 0.434), random forest (0.698, 0.508), extreme gradient boosting (0.696, 0.522), RNN (0.505, 0.301), RNN w/A (0.637, 0.471), and convolutional neural network (0.714, 0.460). HAN-based DL models show promise in information abstraction tasks within unstructured clinical pathology reports.

Gao S ，Young MT ，Qiu JX ，Yoon HJ ，Christian JB ，Fearn PA ，Tourassi GD ，Ramanthan A ... -  《-》

Deep learning uncertainty quantification for clinical text classification.

Peluso A ，Danciu I ，Yoon HJ ，Yusof JM ，Bhattacharya T ，Spannaus A ，Schaefferkoetter N ，Durbin EB ，Wu XC ，Stroup A ，Doherty J ，Schwartz S ，Wiggins C ，Coyle L ，Penberthy L ，Tourassi GD ，Gao S ... -  《-》

Development of message passing-based graph convolutional networks for classifying cancer pathology reports.

Yoon HJ ，Klasky HB ，Blanchard AE ，Christian JB ，Durbin EB ，Wu XC ，Stroup A ，Doherty J ，Coyle L ，Penberthy L ，Tourassi GD ... -  《BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making》