EHRXQA: A Multi-Modal Question Answering Dataset for Electronic Health Records with Chest X-ray Images

Electronic Health Records (EHRs), which contain patients' medical histories in various multi-modal formats, often overlook the potential for joint reasoning across imaging and table modalities underexplored in current EHR Question Answering (QA) systems. In this paper, we introduce EHRXQA, a novel multi-modal question answering dataset combining structured EHRs and chest X-ray images. To develop our dataset, we first construct two uni-modal resources: 1) The MIMIC- CXR-VQA dataset, our newly created medical visual question answering (VQA) benchmark, specifically designed to augment the imaging modality in EHR QA, and 2) EHRSQL (MIMIC-IV), a refashioned version of a previously established table-based EHR QA dataset. By integrating these two uni-modal resources, we successfully construct a multi-modal EHR QA dataset that necessitates both uni-modal and cross-modal reasoning. To address the unique challenges of multi-modal questions within EHRs, we propose a NeuralSQL-based strategy equipped with an external VQA API. This pioneering endeavor enhances engagement with multi-modal EHR sources and we believe that our dataset can catalyze advances in real-world medical scenarios such as clinical decision-making and research. EHRXQA is available at https://github.com/baeseongsu/ehrxqa.

Publicly Shareable Clinical Large Language Model Built on Synthetic Clinical Notes

The development of large language models tailored for handling patients' clinical notes is often hindered by the limited accessibility and usability of these notes due to strict privacy regulations. To address these challenges, we first create synthetic large-scale clinical notes using publicly available case reports extracted from biomedical literature. We then use these synthetic notes to train our specialized clinical large language model, Asclepius. While Asclepius is trained on synthetic data, we assess its potential performance in real-world applications by evaluating it using real clinical notes. We benchmark Asclepius against several other large language models, including GPT-3.5-turbo and other open-source alternatives. To further validate our approach using synthetic notes, we also compare Asclepius with its variants trained on real clinical notes. Our findings convincingly demonstrate that synthetic clinical notes can serve as viable substitutes for real ones when constructing high-performing clinical language models. This conclusion is supported by detailed evaluations conducted by both GPT-4 and medical professionals. All resources including weights, codes, and data used in the development of Asclepius are made publicly accessible for future research.

KU-DMIS-MSRA at RadSum23: Pre-trained Vision-Language Model for Radiology Report Summarization

In this paper, we introduce CheXOFA, a new pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) for the chest X-ray domain. Our model is initially pre-trained on various multimodal datasets within the general domain before being transferred to the chest X-ray domain. Following a prominent VLM, we unify various domain-specific tasks into a simple sequence-to-sequence schema. It enables the model to effectively learn the required knowledge and skills from limited resources in the domain. Demonstrating superior performance on the benchmark datasets provided by the BioNLP shared task, our model benefits from its training across multiple tasks and domains. With subtle techniques including ensemble and factual calibration, our system achieves first place on the RadSum23 leaderboard for the hidden test set.

ECG-QA: A Comprehensive Question Answering Dataset Combined With Electrocardiogram

Question answering (QA) in the field of healthcare has received much attention due to significant advancements in natural language processing. However, existing healthcare QA datasets primarily focus on medical images, clinical notes, or structured electronic health record tables. This leaves the vast potential of combining electrocardiogram (ECG) data with these systems largely untapped. To address this gap, we present ECG-QA, the first QA dataset specifically designed for ECG analysis. The dataset comprises a total of 70 question templates that cover a wide range of clinically relevant ECG topics, each validated by an ECG expert to ensure their clinical utility. As a result, our dataset includes diverse ECG interpretation questions, including those that require a comparative analysis of two different ECGs. In addition, we have conducted numerous experiments to provide valuable insights for future research directions. We believe that ECG-QA will serve as a valuable resource for the development of intelligent QA systems capable of assisting clinicians in ECG interpretations.

EHRSQL: A Practical Text-to-SQL Benchmark for Electronic Health Records

We present a new text-to-SQL dataset for electronic health records (EHRs). The utterances were collected from 222 hospital staff, including physicians, nurses, insurance review and health records teams, and more. To construct the QA dataset on structured EHR data, we conducted a poll at a university hospital and templatized the responses to create seed questions. Then, we manually linked them to two open-source EHR databases, MIMIC-III and eICU, and included them with various time expressions and held-out unanswerable questions in the dataset, which were all collected from the poll. Our dataset poses a unique set of challenges: the model needs to 1) generate SQL queries that reflect a wide range of needs in the hospital, including simple retrieval and complex operations such as calculating survival rate, 2) understand various time expressions to answer time-sensitive questions in healthcare, and 3) distinguish whether a given question is answerable or unanswerable based on the prediction confidence. We believe our dataset, EHRSQL, could serve as a practical benchmark to develop and assess QA models on structured EHR data and take one step further towards bridging the gap between text-to-SQL research and its real-life deployment in healthcare. EHRSQL is available at https://github.com/glee4810/EHRSQL.

Graph-Text Multi-Modal Pre-training for Medical Representation Learning

As the volume of Electronic Health Records (EHR) sharply grows, there has been emerging interest in learning the representation of EHR for healthcare applications. Representation learning of EHR requires appropriate modeling of the two dominant modalities in EHR: structured data and unstructured text. In this paper, we present MedGTX, a pre-trained model for multi-modal representation learning of the structured and textual EHR data. MedGTX uses a novel graph encoder to exploit the graphical nature of structured EHR data, and a text encoder to handle unstructured text, and a cross-modal encoder to learn a joint representation space. We pre-train our model through four proxy tasks on MIMIC-III, an open-source EHR data, and evaluate our model on two clinical benchmarks and three novel downstream tasks which tackle real-world problems in EHR data. The results consistently show the effectiveness of pre-training the model for joint representation of both structured and unstructured information from EHR. Given the promising performance of MedGTX, we believe this work opens a new door to jointly understanding the two fundamental modalities of EHR data.

Uncertainty-Aware Text-to-Program for Question Answering on Structured Electronic Health Records

Question Answering on Electronic Health Records (EHR-QA) has a significant impact on the healthcare domain, and it is being actively studied. Previous research on structured EHR-QA focuses on converting natural language queries into query language such as SQL or SPARQL (NLQ2Query), so the problem scope is limited to pre-defined data types by the specific query language. In order to expand the EHR-QA task beyond this limitation to handle multi-modal medical data and solve complex inference in the future, more primitive systemic language is needed. In this paper, we design the program-based model (NLQ2Program) for EHR-QA as the first step towards the future direction. We tackle MIMICSPARQL*, the graph-based EHR-QA dataset, via a program-based approach in a semi-supervised manner in order to overcome the absence of gold programs. Without the gold program, our proposed model shows comparable performance to the previous state-of-the-art model, which is an NLQ2Query model (0.9\% gain). In addition, for a reliable EHR-QA model, we apply the uncertainty decomposition method to measure the ambiguity in the input question. We empirically confirmed data uncertainty is most indicative of the ambiguity in the input question.

Question Answering for Complex Electronic Health Records Database using Unified Encoder-Decoder Architecture

An intelligent machine that can answer human questions based on electronic health records (EHR-QA) has a great practical value, such as supporting clinical decisions, managing hospital administration, and medical chatbots. Previous table-based QA studies focusing on translating natural questions into table queries (NLQ2SQL), however, suffer from the unique nature of EHR data due to complex and specialized medical terminology, hence increased decoding difficulty. In this paper, we design UniQA, a unified encoder-decoder architecture for EHR-QA where natural language questions are converted to queries such as SQL or SPARQL. We also propose input masking (IM), a simple and effective method to cope with complex medical terms and various typos and better learn the SQL/SPARQL syntax. Combining the unified architecture with an effective auxiliary training objective, UniQA demonstrated a significant performance improvement against the previous state-of-the-art model for MIMICSQL* (14.2% gain), the most complex NLQ2SQL dataset in the EHR domain, and its typo-ridden versions (approximately 28.8% gain). In addition, we confirmed consistent results for the graph-based EHR-QA dataset, MIMICSPARQL*.