Using Medical Named Entity Recognition in Automatic ICD Prediction

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) serves as a standard in medical coding. Researchers in artificial intelligence, including those focused on natural language processing and machine learning, have made a significant effort to build and develop automatic ICD encoding systems and algorithms. Many algorithms have been developed to implement automatic ICD encoding, but almost all of these algorithms depended on the raw text input without taking into consideration the important medical entities in this input. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for automatically predicting ICD codes based on patient claims. Our algorithm contains several steps for finding the most relevant ICD codes. Primarily, our proposed algorithm employs medical named entity recognition (NER) to find the most important medical entities in a patient claim. For this purpose, the Medical NER model was used based on the BERT model. Next, the algorithm generates embeddings for the extracted entities using the ClinicalBERT model. To identify the most relevant ICD code, the algorithm creates embeddings for an ICD catalog, which contains various information such as chapter descriptions, long descriptions, short descriptions, and ICD codes. The embedding process is primarily based on the long descriptions, and the results are stored in a local database that contains embedding vectors and corresponding mapped ICD codes. The final step of the algorithm calculates the cosine similarity between the embedding vector generated from the patient complaint and the ICD long description vectors. The strength of this new algorithm is that it first detects the medical entities in the textual input and then predicts the most similar ICD codes. Also, our developed algorithm does not need such huge data for training. We tested the developed algorithm on a medical dataset, and the results indicate that the proposed method is highly efficient, achieving a precision rate of approximately 90%.