Deep Learning Transformer Models for Building a Comprehensive and Real-time Trauma Observatory: Development and Validation Study.

backgroundPublic health surveillance relies on the collection of data, often in near-real time. Recent advances in natural language processing make it possible to envisage an automated system for extracting information from electronic health records.

objectiveTo study the feasibility of setting up a national trauma observatory in France, we compared the performance of several automatic language processing methods in a multiclass classification task of unstructured clinical notes.

methodsA total of 69,110 free-text clinical notes related to visits to the emergency departments of the University Hospital of Bordeaux, France, between 2012 and 2019 were manually annotated. Among these clinical notes, 32.5% (22,481/69,110) were traumas. We trained 4 transformer models (deep learning models that encompass attention mechanism) and compared them with the term frequency-inverse document frequency associated with the support vector machine method.

resultsThe transformer models consistently performed better than the term frequency-inverse document frequency and a support vector machine. Among the transformers, the GPTanam model pretrained with a French corpus with an additional autosupervised learning step on 306,368 unlabeled clinical notes showed the best performance with a micro F

conclusionsThe transformers proved efficient at the multiclass classification of narrative and medical data. Further steps for improvement should focus on the expansion of abbreviations and multioutput multiclass classification.