Unsupervised Neural Network for Automated Classification of Surgical Urgency Levels in Medical Transcriptions

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tabatabaee, Sadaf, Lam, Sarah S.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Tabatabaee, Sadaf
Lam, Sarah S.
author_facet Tabatabaee, Sadaf
Lam, Sarah S.
contents Efficient classification of surgical procedures by urgency is paramount to optimize patient care and resource allocation within healthcare systems. This study introduces an unsupervised neural network approach to automatically categorize surgical transcriptions into three urgency levels: immediate, urgent, and elective. Leveraging BioClinicalBERT, a domain-specific language model, surgical transcripts are transformed into high-dimensional embeddings that capture their semantic nuances. These embeddings are subsequently clustered using both K-means and Deep Embedding Clustering (DEC) algorithms, in which DEC demonstrates superior performance in the formation of cohesive and well-separated clusters. To ensure clinical relevance and accuracy, the clustering results undergo validation through the Modified Delphi Method, which involves expert review and refinement. Following validation, a neural network that integrates Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) layers with BioClinicalBERT embeddings is developed for classification tasks. The model is rigorously evaluated using cross-validation and metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, which achieve robust performance and demonstrate strong generalization capabilities on unseen data. This unsupervised framework not only addresses the challenge of limited labeled data but also provides a scalable and reliable solution for real-time surgical prioritization, which ultimately enhances operational efficiency and patient outcomes in dynamic medical environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_06214
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unsupervised Neural Network for Automated Classification of Surgical Urgency Levels in Medical Transcriptions
Tabatabaee, Sadaf
Lam, Sarah S.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Efficient classification of surgical procedures by urgency is paramount to optimize patient care and resource allocation within healthcare systems. This study introduces an unsupervised neural network approach to automatically categorize surgical transcriptions into three urgency levels: immediate, urgent, and elective. Leveraging BioClinicalBERT, a domain-specific language model, surgical transcripts are transformed into high-dimensional embeddings that capture their semantic nuances. These embeddings are subsequently clustered using both K-means and Deep Embedding Clustering (DEC) algorithms, in which DEC demonstrates superior performance in the formation of cohesive and well-separated clusters. To ensure clinical relevance and accuracy, the clustering results undergo validation through the Modified Delphi Method, which involves expert review and refinement. Following validation, a neural network that integrates Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) layers with BioClinicalBERT embeddings is developed for classification tasks. The model is rigorously evaluated using cross-validation and metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, which achieve robust performance and demonstrate strong generalization capabilities on unseen data. This unsupervised framework not only addresses the challenge of limited labeled data but also provides a scalable and reliable solution for real-time surgical prioritization, which ultimately enhances operational efficiency and patient outcomes in dynamic medical environments.
title Unsupervised Neural Network for Automated Classification of Surgical Urgency Levels in Medical Transcriptions
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06214