Efficient extraction of medication information from clinical notes: an evaluation in 2 languages

Objective To evaluate the accuracy, computational cost, and portability of a new natural language processing (NLP) method for extracting medication information from clinical narratives. Materials and Methods We propose an original transformer-based architecture for the extraction of entities and their relations pertaining to patients’ medication regimen. First, we used this approach to train and evaluate a model on French clinical notes, using a newly annotated corpus from Hôpitaux Universitaires de Strasbourg. Second, the portability of the approach was assessed by conducting an evaluation on clinical documents in English from the 2018 n2c2 shared task. Information extraction accuracy and computational cost were assessed by comparison with an available method using transformers. Results The proposed architecture achieves on the task of relation extraction itself performance that are competitive with the state-of-the-art on both French and English (F-measures 0.82 and 0.96 vs 0.81 and 0.95), but reduces the computational cost by 10. End-to-end (Named Entity recognition and Relation Extraction) F1 performance is 0.69 and 0.82 for French and English corpus. Discussion While an existing system developed for English notes was deployed in a French hospital setting with reasonable effort, we found that an alternative architecture offered end-to-end drug information extraction with comparable extraction performance and lower computational impact for both French and English clinical text processing, respectively. Conclusion The proposed architecture can be used to extract medication information from clinical text with high performance and low computational cost and consequently suits with usually limited hospital IT resources.