Following the global COVID-19 pandemic, the number of scientific papers studying the virus has grown massively, leading to increased interest in automated literate review. We present a clinical text mining system that improves on previous efforts.
First, it can recognize over 100 different entity types including social determinants of health, anatomy, risk factors, and adverse events in addition to other commonly used clinical and biomedical entities. We illustrate extracting trends and insights, e.g. most frequent disorders and symptoms, and most common vital signs and EKG findings, from the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19).
Second, the text processing pipeline includes assertion status detection, to distinguish between clinical facts that are present, absent, conditional, or about someone other than the patient. The deep learning models used improve on the previous best performing benchmarks for assertion status detection.