Dr. Summarize: Global Summarization of Medical Dialogue by Exploiting Local Structures.
Anirudh Joshi, Namit Katariya, Xavier Amatriain, Anitha Kannan · 2020
Understanding a medical conversation between a patient and a physician poses unique natural language understanding challenge since it combines elements of standard open-ended conversation with very domainspecific elements that require expertise and medical knowledge.Summarization of medical conversations is a particularly important aspect of medical conversation understanding since it addresses a very real need in medical practice: capturing the most important aspects of a medical encounter so that they can be used for medical decision making and subsequent follow ups.In this paper we present a novel approach to medical conversation summarization that leverages the unique and independent local structures created when gathering a patients medical history.Our approach is a variation of the pointer generator network where we introduce a penalty on the generator distribution, and we explicitly model negations.The model also captures important properties of medical conversations such as medical knowledge coming from standardized medical ontologies better than when those concepts are introduced explicitly.Through evaluation by doctors, we show that our approach is preferred on twice the number of summaries to the baseline pointer generator model and captures most or all of the information in 80% of the conversations making it a realistic alternative to costly manual summarization by medical experts.DR: You mentioned having a cough for 2 days and a fever since last night along with being short of breath.Is that correct?PT: yes , correct DR: I appreciate your concern for preventing spread.Do you feel like you are unable to move around as usual?PT: I'm definitely weaker and low energy the fever went down to 99 this morning DR: Have you taken any medications or tried anything else to help you with your symptoms?PT: lots of fluids and vitamin c. lozenges to minimize coughing DR: do you have any medical conditions or have you been on any medications PT: no, none DR: alright.When you had a fever, did you take medicine like tylenol to bring the fever down?PT: I didn't Model Output Summary• mentioned having a cough for 2 days and a fever since last night along with being short of breath.• unable to move around as usual.definitely weaker and low energy fever went down to 99• lots of fluids and vitamin c. lozenges to minimize coughing with symptoms .• no medical conditions.none have any medical conditions.• didn't take medicine like tylenol to bring the fever down.