Chinese Clinical Named Entity Recognition From Electronic Medical Records Based on Multisemantic Features by Using Robustly Optimized Bidirectional Encoder Representation From Transformers Pretraining Approach Whole Word Masking and Convolutional Neural Networks: Model Development and Validation
Authors: Wang Weijie , Li Xiaoying , Ren Huiling , Gao Dongping , Fang An 
Published: April 2023

Background

Clinical electronic medical records (EMRs) contain important information on patients’ anatomy, symptoms, examinations, diagnoses, and medications. Large-scale mining of rich medical information from EMRs will provide notable reference value for medical research. With the complexity of Chinese grammar and blurred boundaries of Chinese words, Chinese clinical named entity recognition (CNER) remains a notable challenge. Follow-up tasks such as medical entity structuring, medical entity standardization, medical entity relationship extraction, and medical knowledge graph construction largely depend on medical named entity recognition effects. A promising CNER result would provide reliable support for building domain knowledge graphs, knowledge bases, and knowledge retrieval systems. Furthermore, it would provide research ideas for scientists and medical decision-making references for doctors and even guide patients on disease and health management. Therefore, obtaining excellent CNER results is essential.

Objective

We aimed to propose a Chinese CNER method to learn semantics-enriched representations for comprehensively enhancing machines to understand deep semantic information of EMRs by using multisemantic features, which makes medical information more readable and understandable.

Methods

First, we used Robustly Optimized Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers Pretraining Approach Whole Word Masking (RoBERTa-wwm) with dynamic fusion and Chinese character features, including 5-stroke code, Zheng code, phonological code, and stroke code, extracted by 1-dimensional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to obtain fine-grained semantic features of Chinese characters. Subsequently, we converted Chinese characters into square images to obtain Chinese character image features from another modality by using a 2-dimensional CNN. Finally, we input multisemantic features into Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory with Conditional Random Fields to achieve Chinese CNER. The effectiveness of our model was compared with that of the baseline and existing research models, and the features involved in the model were ablated and analyzed to verify the model’s effectiveness.

Results

We collected 1379 Yidu-S4K EMRs containing 23,655 entities in 6 categories and 2007 self-annotated EMRs containing 118,643 entities in 7 categories. The experiments showed that our model outperformed the comparison experiments, with F1-scores of 89.28% and 84.61% on the Yidu-S4K and self-annotated data sets, respectively. The results of the ablation analysis demonstrated that each feature and method we used could improve the entity recognition ability.

Conclusions

Our proposed CNER method would mine the richer deep semantic information in EMRs by multisemantic embedding using RoBERTa-wwm and CNNs, enhancing the semantic recognition of characters at different granularity levels and improving the generalization capability of the method by achieving information complementarity among different semantic features, thus making the machine semantically understand EMRs and improving the CNER task accuracy.