HuskyScribe at MEDIQA-Sum 2023: Summarizing Clinical Dialogues with Transformers

📖📖 Paper Synopsis: HuskyScribe at MEDIQA-Sum 2023: Summarizing Clinical Dialogues with Transformers

Documentation burnout contributes to clinician job dissatisfaction, and clinical notes often omit salient information. The automatic generation of notes from doctor-patient conversations using a computerized medical scribe, referred to as a Digital Scribe, provides an alternative, potentially time-saving documentation process. Generating notes from the transcribed patient interviews requires reorganizing utterances by topical note sections, identifying the clinically significant information, and generating a medical language summary. The MEDIQA-Sum task of ImageCLEF 2023 explores the development of Digital Scribe through the generation of clinical note summaries of transcribed patient visits. We participated in all three Subtasks and made contributions related to note subsection classification and dialogue-note alignment. We achieved high classification accuracy (81.5%) for Subtask A by fine-tuning T5-large, which ranked 2ND among 10 participants. We explored the capabilities of state-of-the-art large language models in the Subtask B summarization task. For Subtask C, we manually annotated the alignment between dialogue transcripts and clinical notes for a subset of training examples, to assist in learning the mapping from dialogue content to clinical note subsection.

September 6th, 2023 by Bin Han