What's in a Summary? Laying the Groundwork for Advances in Hospital-Course Summarization

Summarization of clinical narratives is a long-standing research problem. Here, we introduce the task of hospital-course summarization. Given the documentation authored throughout a patient's hospitalization, generate a paragraph that tells the story of the patient admission. We construct an En...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2021-04
Main Authors: Adams, Griffin, Alsentzer, Emily, Ketenci, Mert, Zucker, Jason, Elhadad, Noémie
Format: Article
Language:English
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Summarization of clinical narratives is a long-standing research problem. Here, we introduce the task of hospital-course summarization. Given the documentation authored throughout a patient's hospitalization, generate a paragraph that tells the story of the patient admission. We construct an English, text-to-text dataset of 109,000 hospitalizations (2M source notes) and their corresponding summary proxy: the clinician-authored "Brief Hospital Course" paragraph written as part of a discharge note. Exploratory analyses reveal that the BHC paragraphs are highly abstractive with some long extracted fragments; are concise yet comprehensive; differ in style and content organization from the source notes; exhibit minimal lexical cohesion; and represent silver-standard references. Our analysis identifies multiple implications for modeling this complex, multi-document summarization task.
ISSN:2331-8422