Following each patient visit, physicians must draft a detailed clinical summary called a SOAP note. Moreover, with electronic health records, these notes must be digitized. Despite the benefits of this documentation, their creation remains an onerous process, contributing to increasing physician burnout. In this paper, we present the first study to evaluate complete pipelines to train summarization models to generate these notes from conversations between physicians and patients. We benefit from a dataset that, along with transcripts and paired SOAP notes, consists of annotations marking noteworthy utterances that support each summary sentence. We decompose the problem into extractive and abstractive subtasks, exploring a spectrum of approaches according to how much they demand from each component. We observe that the performance improves constantly as the extractive subtask is made more complex - an observation that we also replicate on the well-known AMI meeting summarization dataset. Our best performing method first (i) extracts noteworthy utterances via multi-label classification, assigning each to summary section(s) ; (ii) clusters noteworthy utteranceson a per-section basis; and (iii) generates the summary sentences by conditioning on the corresponding cluster and the subsection of the SOAP sentence to be generated. Compared to an end-to-end approach that generates the full SOAP note from the full conversation, our approach improves by around 8 ROUGE-1 points .
Following each patient visit, physicians draft long semi-structured clinical summaries called SOAP notes. While invaluable to clinicians and researchers, creating digital SOAP notes is burdensome, contributing to physician burnout. In this paper, we introduce the first complete pipelines to leverage deep summarization models to generate these notes based on transcripts of conversations between physicians and patients. After exploring a spectrum of methods across the extractive-abstractive spectrum, we propose Cluster2Sent, an algorithm that (i) extracts important utterances relevant to each summary section ; (ii) clusters together related utterances; and then (iii) generates one summary sentence per cluster. Cluster2Sent outperforms its purely abstractive counterpart by 8 ROUGE-1 points, and produces significantly more factual and coherent sentences as assessed by expert human evaluators. For reproducibility, we demonstrate similar benefits on the publicly available AMI dataset. Our results speak to the benefits of structuring summaries into sections and annotating supporting evidence when constructing summarization corpora .
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must draft a detailed clinical summary called a SOAP note. Moreover, with electronic health records, these notes must be digitized. Despite the benefits of this documentation, their creation remains an onerous process, contributing to increasing
draft long semi-structured clinical summaries called SOAP notes. While invaluable to clinicians and researchers, creating digital SOAP notes is burdensome, contributing to
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present the first study to evaluate
introduce the first
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train
leverage deep
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from
based on transcripts of
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We benefit from a dataset that, along with transcripts and paired SOAP notes, consists of annotations marking noteworthy utterances that support each summary sentence. We decompose the problem into extractive and abstractive subtasks,
After
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approaches according to how much they demand from each component. We observe that the performance improves constantly as the extractive subtask is made more complex - an observation that we also replicate on the well-known AMI meeting summarization dataset. Our best performing method first
methods across the extractive-abstractive spectrum, we propose Cluster2Sent, an algorithm that
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noteworthy utterances via multi-label classification, assigning each to summary section(s)
important utterances relevant to each summary section
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noteworthy utteranceson a per-section basis; and
together related utterances; and then
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the summary sentences by conditioning on the corresponding cluster and the subsection of the SOAP sentence to be generated. Compared to an end-to-end approach that generates the full SOAP note from the full conversation, our approach improves by around
one summary sentence per cluster. Cluster2Sent outperforms its purely abstractive counterpart by
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points
points, and produces significantly more factual and coherent sentences as assessed by expert human evaluators. For reproducibility, we demonstrate similar benefits on the publicly available AMI dataset. Our results speak to the benefits of structuring summaries into sections and annotating supporting evidence when constructing summarization corpora