Disambiguating Clinical Abbreviations by One-to-All Classification: Algorithm Development and Validation Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Electronic medical records store extensive patient data and serve as a comprehensive repository, including textual medical records like surgical and imaging reports. Their utility in clinical decision support systems is substantial, but the widespread use of ambiguous and unstandardized abbreviations in clinical documents poses challenges for natural language processing in clinical decision support systems. Efficient abbreviation disambiguation methods are needed for effective information extraction. Objective: This study aims to enhance the one-to-all (OTA) framework for clinical abbreviation expansion, which uses a single model to predict multiple abbreviation meanings. The objective is to improve OTA by developing context-candidate pairs and optimizing word embeddings in Bidirectional Encoder Representations From Transformers (BERT), evaluating the model's efficacy in expanding clinical abbreviations using real data. Methods: Three datasets were used: Medical Subject Headings Word Sense Disambiguation, University of Minnesota, and Chia-Yi Christian Hospital from Ditmanson Medical Foundation Chia-Yi Christian Hospital. Texts containing polysemous abbreviations were preprocessed and formatted for BERT. The study involved fine-tuning pretrained models, ClinicalBERT and BlueBERT, generating dataset pairs for training and testing based on Huang et al's method. Results: BlueBERT achieved macro- and microaccuracies of 95.41% and 95.16%, respectively, on the Medical Subject Headings Word Sense Disambiguation dataset. It improved macroaccuracy by 0.54%-1.53% compared to two baselines, long short-term memory and deepBioWSD with random embedding. On the University of Minnesota dataset, BlueBERT recorded macro- and microaccuracies of 98.40% and 98.22%, respectively. Against the baselines of Word2Vec + support vector machine and BioWordVec + support vector machine, BlueBERT demonstrated a macroaccuracy improvement of 2.61%-4.13%. Conclusions: This research preliminarily validated the effectiveness of the OTA method for abbreviation disambiguation in medical texts, demonstrating the potential to enhance both clinical staff efficiency and research effectiveness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".