Clinical Named Entity Recognition system (CliNER) is an open-source natural language processing system for named entity recognition in clinical text of electronic health records. CliNER system is designed to follow best practices in clinical concept extraction, as established in i2b2 2010 shared task.
- CliNER is implemented as a sequence classification task, where every token is predicted IOB-style as either: Problem, Test, Treatment, or None. Coomand line flags let you specify two different sequence classification algorithms:
- CRF (default) - with linguistic and domain-specific features
- LSTM
Please note that for optimal performance, CliNER requires the users to obtain a Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) license, since UMLS Metathesaurus is used as one of the knowledge sources for the above classifiers.
- Free software: Apache v2.0 license
- Documentation: http://cliner.readthedocs.org.
pip install -r requirements.txt
wget http://text-machine.cs.uml.edu/cliner/samples/doc_1.txt
wget http://text-machine.cs.uml.edu/cliner/models/silver.crf; mv silver.crf models/silver.crf
cliner predict --txt doc_1.txt --out data/predictions --model models/silver.crf --format i2b2
There are a few external resources that are not packaged with CliNER but can improve prediction performance for feature extraction with the CRF.
GENIA
The GENIA tagger identifies named entities in biomedical text.
> wget http://www.nactem.ac.uk/tsujii/GENIA/tagger/geniatagger-3.0.2.tar.gz > tar xzvf geniatagger-3.0.2.tar.gz > cd geniatagger-3.0.2 > make
Edit config.txt so that GENIA references the geniatagger executable just built. (e.g. "GENIA /someuser/CliNER/geniatagger-3.0.2/geniatagger")
UMLS
> TODO
There are a few external resources that are not packaged with CliNER but can improve prediction performance for feature extraction with the CRF.
GENIA
The GENIA tagger identifies named entities in biomedical text.
> wget http://www.nactem.ac.uk/tsujii/GENIA/tagger/geniatagger-3.0.2.tar.gz > tar xzvf geniatagger-3.0.2.tar.gz > cd geniatagger-3.0.2 > make
Edit config.txt so that GENIA references the geniatagger executable just built. (e.g. "GENIA /someuser/CliNER/geniatagger-3.0.2/geniatagger")
UMLS
> TODO
The Data Use and Confidentiality Agreement (DUA) with i2b2 forbids us from redistributing the i2b2 data. In order to gain access to the data, you must go to:
https://www.i2b2.org/NLP/DataSets/AgreementAR.php
to register and sign the DUA. Then you will be able to request the data through them.
The cliner pipeline assumes that the clinical text has been preprocessed to be tokenized, as in accordance with the i2b2 format. I have included a simple tokenization script (see: tools/tok.py) that you can use or modify as you wish.
The silver model does come with some degradation of performance. Given that the alternative is no model, I think this is okay, but be aware that if you have the i2b2 training data, then you can build a model that performs even better on the i2b2 test data.
Original Model (trained on i2b2-train data with UMLS + GENIA feats)
- TESTING 1.1 - Exact span for all concepts together
- TP FN FP Recall Precision F1
Class Exact Span -> 23358 4904 7696 0.826 0.752 0.788
- TESTING 1.2 - Exact span for separate concept classes
- TP FN FP Recall Precision F1
Exact Span With Matching Class for Problem -> 9478 2291 3077 0.805 0.755 0.779 Exact Span With Matching Class for Treatment -> 6881 1402 2398 0.831 0.742 0.784 Exact Span With Matching Class for Test -> 6999 1211 2221 0.852 0.759 0.803
Silver Model (trained on mimic data that was annotated by Original Model)
- TESTING 1.1 - Exact span for all concepts together
- TP FN FP Recall Precision F1
Class Exact Span -> 20771 5504 10283 0.791 0.669 0.725
- TESTING 1.2 - Exact span for separate concept classes
- TP FN FP Recall Precision F1
Exact Span With Matching Class for Problem -> 8735 2875 3820 0.752 0.696 0.7229464100972481 Exact Span With Matching Class for Treatment -> 5961 1278 3318 0.823 0.642 0.721758082092263 Exact Span With Matching Class for Test -> 6075 1351 3145 0.818 0.659 0.7299050823020545