Yoon, HongJun | Search NASA

DOE OSTI2018

PathRepHAN: Hierarchical attention networks for pathology report classification

Developers at ORNL explored how a deep learning (DL) approach based on hierarchical attention networks (HANs) can improve model performance for multiple information extraction tasks from unstructured cancer pathology reports compared to conventional methods that do not sufficiently capture syntactic and semantic contexts from free-text documents. The HAN was implemented for 2 information extraction tasks: (1) primary site, matched to 12 International Classification of Diseases for Oncology topography codes (7 breast, 5 lung primary sites), and (2) histological grade classification, matched to G1–G4. Our results demonstrate that for both information tasks, HAN performed significantly better compared to the conventional ML and DL techniques.

Ramanathan, Arvind↗

DOE OSTI2018

Multi-Task Convolutional Neural Networks for Natural Text Classification

Information extraction and coding of free-text pathology reports is an important activity for cancer registries to support national cancer surveillance. Cancer registrars must process high volumes of pathology reports on an annual basis. We investigated an automated approach using a convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for extracting the primary site, laterality, histology, behavior, and histological grade from unstructured cancer pathology text reports. Our multi-task learning (MTL) with hard parameter sharing approach is used to train a multi-task MT-CNN model for all the tasks. The performance of our proposed approach was compared against a state of-the-art CNN and the commonly used SVM classifier. We observed that the proposed model consistently outperformed the baseline models, especially for the less prevalent classes. Also, the results demonstrate the potential of the proposed method for handling class imbalance within each task.

Yoon, HongJun↗