Large-scale Application of Named Entity Recognition to Biomedicine and Epidemiology

Background: Despite significant advancements in biomedical named entity recognition methods, the clinical application of these systems continues to face many challenges: (1) most of the methods are trained on a limited set of clinical entities; (2) these methods are heavily reliant on a large amount of data for both pre-training and prediction, making their use in production impractical; (3) they do not consider non-clinical entities, which are also related to patient's health, such as social, economic or demographic factors.

Methods: In this paper, we develop Bio-Epidemiology-NER (https://pypi.org/project/Bio-Epidemiology-NER/) an open-source Python package for detecting biomedical named entities from the text. This approach is based on a Transformer-based system and trained on a dataset that is annotated with many named entities (medical, clinical, biomedical, and epidemiological). This approach improves on previous efforts in three ways: (1) it recognizes many clinical entity types, such as medical risk factors, vital signs, drugs, and biological functions; (2) it is easily configurable, reusable, and can scale up for training and inference; (3) it also considers non-clinical factors (age and gender, race and social history and so) that influence health outcomes. At a high level, it consists of the phases: pre-processing, data parsing, named entity recognition, and named entity enhancement.

Results: Experimental results show that our pipeline outperforms other methods on three benchmark datasets with macro-and micro average F1 scores around 90 percent and above.

Conclusion: This package is made publicly available for researchers, doctors, clinicians, and anyone to extract biomedical named entities from unstructured biomedical texts.