SigBERT: Combining Narrative Medical Reports and Rough Path Signature Theory for Survival Risk Estimation in Oncology

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Hauptverfasser: Minchella, Paul, Verlingue, Loïc, Chrétien, Stéphane, Vaucher, Rémi, Metzler, Guillaume
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Minchella, Paul
Verlingue, Loïc
Chrétien, Stéphane
Vaucher, Rémi
Metzler, Guillaume
author_facet Minchella, Paul
Verlingue, Loïc
Chrétien, Stéphane
Vaucher, Rémi
Metzler, Guillaume
contents Electronic medical reports (EHR) contain a vast amount of information that can be leveraged for machine learning applications in healthcare. However, existing survival analysis methods often struggle to effectively handle the complexity of textual data, particularly in its sequential form. Here, we propose SigBERT, an innovative temporal survival analysis framework designed to efficiently process a large number of clinical reports per patient. SigBERT processes timestamped medical reports by extracting and averaging word embeddings into sentence embeddings. To capture temporal dynamics from the time series of sentence embedding coordinates, we apply signature extraction from rough path theory to derive geometric features for each patient, which significantly enhance survival model performance by capturing complex temporal dynamics. These features are then integrated into a LASSO-penalized Cox model to estimate patient-specific risk scores. The model was trained and evaluated on a real-world oncology dataset from the Léon Bérard Center corpus, with a C-index score of 0.75 (sd 0.014) on the independent test cohort. SigBERT integrates sequential medical data to enhance risk estimation, advancing narrative-based survival analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_22941
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SigBERT: Combining Narrative Medical Reports and Rough Path Signature Theory for Survival Risk Estimation in Oncology
Minchella, Paul
Verlingue, Loïc
Chrétien, Stéphane
Vaucher, Rémi
Metzler, Guillaume
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
Applications
Electronic medical reports (EHR) contain a vast amount of information that can be leveraged for machine learning applications in healthcare. However, existing survival analysis methods often struggle to effectively handle the complexity of textual data, particularly in its sequential form. Here, we propose SigBERT, an innovative temporal survival analysis framework designed to efficiently process a large number of clinical reports per patient. SigBERT processes timestamped medical reports by extracting and averaging word embeddings into sentence embeddings. To capture temporal dynamics from the time series of sentence embedding coordinates, we apply signature extraction from rough path theory to derive geometric features for each patient, which significantly enhance survival model performance by capturing complex temporal dynamics. These features are then integrated into a LASSO-penalized Cox model to estimate patient-specific risk scores. The model was trained and evaluated on a real-world oncology dataset from the Léon Bérard Center corpus, with a C-index score of 0.75 (sd 0.014) on the independent test cohort. SigBERT integrates sequential medical data to enhance risk estimation, advancing narrative-based survival analysis.
title SigBERT: Combining Narrative Medical Reports and Rough Path Signature Theory for Survival Risk Estimation in Oncology
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22941