Identifying the Perceived Severity of Patient-Generated Telemedical Queries Regarding COVID: Developing and Evaluating a Transfer Learning–Based Solution

BACKGROUND: Triage of textual telemedical queries is a safety-critical task for medical service providers with limited remote health resources. The prioritization of patient queries containing medically severe text is necessary to optimize resource usage and provide care to those with time-sensitive needs. OBJECTIVE: We aim to evaluate the effectiveness of transfer learning solutions on the task of telemedical triage and provide a thorough error analysis, identifying telemedical queries that challenge state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) systems. Additionally, we aim to provide a publicly available telemedical query data set with labels for severity classification for telemedical triage of respiratory issues. METHODS: We annotated 573 medical queries from 3 online health platforms: HealthTap, HealthcareMagic, and iCliniq. We then evaluated 6 transfer learning solutions utilizing various text-embedding strategies. Specifically, we first established a baseline using a lexical classification model with term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) features. Next, we investigated the effectiveness of global vectors for text representation (GloVe), a pretrained word-embedding method. We evaluated the performance of GloVe embeddings in the context of support vector machines (SVMs), bidirectional long short-term memory (bi-LSTM) networks, and hierarchical attention networks (HANs). Finally, we evaluated the performance of contextual text embeddings using transformer-based architectures. Specifically, we evaluated bidirectional encoder representation from transformers (BERT), Bio+Clinical-BERT, and Sentence-BERT (SBERT) on the telemedical triage task. RESULTS: We found that a simple lexical model achieved a mean F1 score of 0.865 (SD 0.048) on the telemedical triage task. GloVe-based models using SVMs, HANs, and bi-LSTMs achieved a 0.8-, 1.5-, and 2.1-point increase in the F1 score, respectively. Transformer-based models, such as BERT, Bio+Clinical-BERT, and SBERT, achieved a mean F1 score of 0.914 (SD 0.034), 0.904 (SD 0.041), and 0.917 (SD 0.037), respectively. The highest-performing model, SBERT, provided a statistically significant improvement compared to all GloVe-based and lexical baselines. However, no statistical significance was found when comparing transformer-based models. Furthermore, our error analysis revealed highly challenging query types, including those with complex negations, temporal relationships, and patient intents. CONCLUSIONS: We showed that state-of-the-art transfer learning techniques work well on the telemedical triage task, providing significant performance increase over lexical models. Additionally, we released a public telemedical triage data set using labeled questions from online medical question-and-answer (Q&A) platforms. Our analysis highlights various avenues for future works that explicitly model such query challenges.

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