Abstract
The development of neural networks for clinical artificial intelligence (AI) is reliant on interpretability, transparency, and performance. The need to delve into the black-box neural network and derive interpretable explanations of model output is paramount. A task of high clinical importance is predicting the likelihood of a patient being readmitted to hospital in the near future to enable efficient triage. With the increasing adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), there is great interest in applications of natural language processing (NLP) to clinical free-text contained within EHRs. In this work, we apply InfoCal, the current state-of-the-art model that produces extractive rationales for its predictions, to the task of predicting hospital readmission using hospital discharge notes. We compare extractive rationales produced by InfoCal to competitive transformer-based models pretrained on clinical text data and for which the attention mechanism can be used for interpretation. We find each presented model with selected interpretability or feature importance methods yield varying results, with clinical language domain expertise and pretraining critical to performance and subsequent interpretability.
Niall Taylor
DPhil Student
Niall is a DPhil candidate at the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford. He contributes his expertise with NLP for clinical data to the chronosig project.
Dan W Joyce
Clinical Research Fellow
My research explores how computational methods can be used to improve personalisation of care for patients with mental illness
Alejo J Nevado-Holgado
Associate Professor
I am an Associate Professor of the Department of Psychiatry and the Big Data Institute, and part of Dementia Research Oxford. I am very glad to supervise the AI team in the TNDR, formed by 10 excellent machine learners and bioinformaticians. Our focus is on the applications of machine learning and bioinformatics to mental health care. In addition, I also hold a position at the Big Data Institute, where we collaborate in the application of machine learning to genomics and target discovery. I am also consultant to a number of AI companies.
Andrey Kormilitzin
Senior Researcher
My research is centred around translating advances in mathematics, statistical machine learning and deep learning to address challenges involved in learning, inference and ethical decision making using complex biomedical and health data.