Information Extraction from Clinical Notes: Are We Ready to Switch to Large Language Models?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hu, Yan, Zuo, Xu, Zhou, Yujia, Peng, Xueqing, Huang, Jimin, Keloth, Vipina K., Zhang, Vincent J., Weng, Ruey-Ling, Chen, Qingyu, Jiang, Xiaoqian, Roberts, Kirk E., Xu, Hua
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Published: 2024
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author Hu, Yan
Zuo, Xu
Zhou, Yujia
Peng, Xueqing
Huang, Jimin
Keloth, Vipina K.
Zhang, Vincent J.
Weng, Ruey-Ling
Chen, Qingyu
Jiang, Xiaoqian
Roberts, Kirk E.
Xu, Hua
author_facet Hu, Yan
Zuo, Xu
Zhou, Yujia
Peng, Xueqing
Huang, Jimin
Keloth, Vipina K.
Zhang, Vincent J.
Weng, Ruey-Ling
Chen, Qingyu
Jiang, Xiaoqian
Roberts, Kirk E.
Xu, Hua
contents Backgrounds: Information extraction (IE) is critical in clinical natural language processing (NLP). While large language models (LLMs) excel on generative tasks, their performance on extractive tasks remains debated. Methods: We investigated Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) using 1,588 clinical notes from four sources (UT Physicians, MTSamples, MIMIC-III, and i2b2). We developed an annotated corpus covering 4 clinical entities and 16 modifiers, and compared instruction-tuned LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 against BERT in terms of performance, generalizability, computational resources, and throughput to BERT. Results: LLaMA models outperformed BERT across datasets. With sufficient training data, LLaMA showed modest improvements (1% on NER, 1.5-3.7% on RE); improvements were larger with limited training data. On unseen i2b2 data, LLaMA-3-70B outperformed BERT by 7% (F1) on NER and 4% on RE. However, LLaMA models required more computing resources and ran up to 28 times slower. We implemented "Kiwi," a clinical IE package featuring both models, available at https://kiwi.clinicalnlp.org/. Conclusion: This study is among the first to develop and evaluate a comprehensive clinical IE system using open-source LLMs. Results indicate that LLaMA models outperform BERT for clinical NER and RE but with higher computational costs and lower throughputs. These findings highlight that choosing between LLMs and traditional deep learning methods for clinical IE applications should remain task-specific, taking into account both performance metrics and practical considerations such as available computing resources and the intended use case scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_10020
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Information Extraction from Clinical Notes: Are We Ready to Switch to Large Language Models?
Hu, Yan
Zuo, Xu
Zhou, Yujia
Peng, Xueqing
Huang, Jimin
Keloth, Vipina K.
Zhang, Vincent J.
Weng, Ruey-Ling
Chen, Qingyu
Jiang, Xiaoqian
Roberts, Kirk E.
Xu, Hua
Computation and Language
Backgrounds: Information extraction (IE) is critical in clinical natural language processing (NLP). While large language models (LLMs) excel on generative tasks, their performance on extractive tasks remains debated. Methods: We investigated Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) using 1,588 clinical notes from four sources (UT Physicians, MTSamples, MIMIC-III, and i2b2). We developed an annotated corpus covering 4 clinical entities and 16 modifiers, and compared instruction-tuned LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 against BERT in terms of performance, generalizability, computational resources, and throughput to BERT. Results: LLaMA models outperformed BERT across datasets. With sufficient training data, LLaMA showed modest improvements (1% on NER, 1.5-3.7% on RE); improvements were larger with limited training data. On unseen i2b2 data, LLaMA-3-70B outperformed BERT by 7% (F1) on NER and 4% on RE. However, LLaMA models required more computing resources and ran up to 28 times slower. We implemented "Kiwi," a clinical IE package featuring both models, available at https://kiwi.clinicalnlp.org/. Conclusion: This study is among the first to develop and evaluate a comprehensive clinical IE system using open-source LLMs. Results indicate that LLaMA models outperform BERT for clinical NER and RE but with higher computational costs and lower throughputs. These findings highlight that choosing between LLMs and traditional deep learning methods for clinical IE applications should remain task-specific, taking into account both performance metrics and practical considerations such as available computing resources and the intended use case scenarios.
title Information Extraction from Clinical Notes: Are We Ready to Switch to Large Language Models?
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10020