Hybrid Deep Learning for Medication-Related Information Extraction From Clinical Texts in French: MedExt Algorithm...

Information related to patient medication is crucial for health care; however, up to 80% of the information resides solely in unstructured text. Manual extraction is difficult and time-consuming, and there is not a lot of research on natural language processing extracting medical information from unstructured text from French corpora.

We aimed to develop a system to extract medication-related information from clinical text written in French.

We developed a hybrid system combining an expert rule-based system, contextual word embedding (embedding for language model) trained on clinical notes, and a deep recurrent neural network (bidirectional long short term memory-conditional random field). The task consisted of extracting drug mentions and their related information (eg, dosage, frequency, duration, route, condition). We manually annotated 320 clinical notes from a French clinical data warehouse to train and evaluate the model. We compared the performance of our approach to those of standard approaches: rule-based or machine learning only and classic word embeddings. We evaluated the models using token-level recall, precision, and F-measure.

The overall F-measure was 89.9% (precision 90.8; recall: 89.2) when combining expert rules and contextualized embeddings, compared to 88.1% (precision 89.5; recall 87.2) without expert rules or contextualized embeddings. The F-measures for each category were 95.3% for medication name, 64.4% for drug class mentions, 95.3% for dosage, 92.2% for frequency, 78.8% for duration, and 62.2% for condition of the intake.

Associating expert rules, deep contextualized embedding, and deep neural networks improved medication information extraction. Our results revealed a synergy when associating expert knowledge and latent knowledge.