What's in a Summary? Laying the Groundwork for Advances in Hospital Course Summarization
Video
Team Information
Team Members
Griffin Adams, PhD Candidate in Computer Science, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University
Mert Ketenci, PhD Candidate in Computer Science, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University
Faculty Advisor: Noemie Elhadad, Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University
Abstract
Summarization of clinical narratives is a long-standing research problem. Here, we introduce the task of hospital-course summarization. Given the documentation authored throughout a patient’s hospitalization, generate a paragraph that tells the story of the patient admission. We construct an English, text-to-text dataset of 109,000 hospitalizations (2M source notes) and their corresponding summary proxy: the clinician-authored “Brief Hospital Course” paragraph written as part of a discharge note. Exploratory analyses reveal that the BHC paragraphs are highly abstractive with some long extracted fragments; are concise yet comprehensive; differ in style and content organization from the source notes; exhibit minimal lexical cohesion; and represent silver-standard references. Our analysis identifies multiple implications for modeling this complex, multi-document summarization task.
Team Lead Contact
Griffin Adams: griffin.adams@columbia.edu