Evidence map›Paper›PMID 34017034›Full record

ArticleNPJ digital medicine2021

Med-BERT: pretrained contextualized embeddings on large-scale structured electronic health records for disease prediction.

Laila Rasmy, Yang Xiang, Ziqian Xie, Cui Tao, Degui Zhi

Open access · goldAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in NPJ digital medicine, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 298 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
298citing papers in PubMed, 5 pooled it
71.1field-weighted citation impact, top 1% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

298 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 780 citations in OpenAlex.

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238 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.

Laila Rasmy *School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX, USA.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2644-4908
Yang Xiang *Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China. xiangy@pcl.ac.cn.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1395-6805
Ziqian Xie *School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX, USA.
Cui TaoSchool of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX, USA.
Degui ZhiSchool of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX, USA. Degui.Zhi@uth.tmc.edu.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7754-1890
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston · USPeng Cheng Laboratory · CNThe University of Texas Health Science Center · US

Funding

American Heart Association (American Heart Association, Inc.) 19GPSGC35180031Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas) RP160015Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas) RP170668
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Deep learning (DL)-based predictive models from electronic health records (EHRs) deliver impressive performance in many clinical tasks. Large training cohorts, however, are often required by these models to achieve high accuracy, hindering the adoption of DL-based models in scenarios with limited training data. Recently, bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) and related models have achieved tremendous successes in the natural language processing domain. The pretraining of BERT on a very large training corpus generates contextualized embeddings that can boost the performance of models trained on smaller datasets. Inspired by BERT, we propose Med-BERT, which adapts the BERT framework originally developed for the text domain to the structured EHR domain. Med-BERT is a contextualized embedding model pretrained on a structured EHR dataset of 28,490,650 patients. Fine-tuning experiments showed that Med-BERT substantially improves the prediction accuracy, boosting the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC) by 1.21-6.14% in two disease prediction tasks from two clinical databases. In particular, pretrained Med-BERT obtains promising performances on tasks with small fine-tuning training sets and can boost the AUC by more than 20% or obtain an AUC as high as a model trained on a training set ten times larger, compared with deep learning models without Med-BERT. We believe that Med-BERT will benefit disease prediction studies with small local training datasets, reduce data collection expenses, and accelerate the pace of artificial intelligence aided healthcare.

Identifiers

PMID34017034
PMCPMC8137882
OpenAlexW3160137267

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY
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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.