Automatic ICD-10 Classification of Diseases from Dutch Discharge Letters

The international classification of diseases (ICD) is a widely used tool to describe patient diagnoses. At University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU), for example, trained medical coders translate information from hospital discharge letters into ICD-10 codes for research and national disease epidemiology statistics, at considerable cost. To mitigate these costs, automatic ICD coding from discharge letters would be useful. However, this task has proven challenging in practice: it is a multi-label task with a large number of very sparse categories, presented in a hierarchical structure. Moreover,... Mehr ...