Background Accurate extraction of the relations between clinical entities is important for tasks like clinical decision support, automated medical coding, and large-scale analysis of clinical text. However, most of the medical records are written as long, unstructured, and sometimes noisy narratives. This makes it difficult for traditional relation extraction systems to properly analyze the document-level context. Improving relation extraction after entity recognition is still a key challenge in clinical natural language processing. Methods In this work, we propose a deep learning framework that combines RoBERTa, a bidirectional gated recurrent units (Bi-GRU), a multi-level attention mechanism, and a conditional random field (CRF) layer for clinical relation extraction. RoBERTa is used to generate strong contextual embeddings for each token. The Bi-GRU layers then model the sequential semantic dependencies in a more lightweight way compared to the transformer-only models. The multi-level attention module operates at both word and sentence level to down-weight the irrelevant or noisy information and highlight the clinically important context. Finally, a CRF layer is added on top to produce the globally consistent relation labels. The model is then trained and evaluated on the MTSamples clinical transcription dataset. Results The experimental results shows that the proposed model performs better than the recent baseline systems and achieves higher F1-score. The use of multi-level attention clearly improves the ability of the model to capture long-range context and document-level relation clues. Conclusion The RoBERTa-Bi-GRU-Attention-CRF framework offers an effective and scalable way to extract the relationships between entities from unstructured clinical narratives. The improved relation extraction performance can support more accurate downstream applications in clinical information extraction and intelligent healthcare systems.
Challa et al. (Mon,) studied this question.