Leveraging Natural Language Processing and Clinical Notes for Dementia Detection

Ming Liu, Richard Beare, Taya Collyer, Nadine Andrew, Velandai Srikanth

The 5th Workshop on Clinical Natural Language Processing (ClinicalNLP) N/a Paper

TLDR: Early detection and automated classification of dementia has recently gained considerable attention using neuroimaging data and spontaneous speech. In this paper, we validate the possibility of dementia detection with in-hospital clinical notes. We collected 954 patients' clinical notes from a local
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Abstract: Early detection and automated classification of dementia has recently gained considerable attention using neuroimaging data and spontaneous speech. In this paper, we validate the possibility of dementia detection with in-hospital clinical notes. We collected 954 patients' clinical notes from a local hospital and assign dementia/non-dementia labels to those patients based on clinical assessment and telephone interview. Given the labeled dementia data sets, we fine tune a ClinicalBioBERT based on some filtered clinical notes and conducted experiments on both binary and three class dementia classification. Our experiment results show that the fine tuned ClinicalBioBERT achieved satisfied performance on binary classification but failed on three class dementia classification. Further analysis suggests that more human prior knowledge should be considered.