Work

Large-scale identification of social and behavioral determinants of health from clinical notes: comparison of Latent Semantic Indexing and Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) models

Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: BACKGROUND: Social and behavioral determinants of health (SBDH) are associated with a variety of health and utilization outcomes, yet these factors are not routinely documented in the structured fields of electronic health records (EHR). The objective of this study was to evaluate different machine learning approaches for detection of SBDH from the unstructured clinical notes in the EHR. METHODS: Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) was applied to 2,083,180 clinical notes corresponding to 46,146 patients in the MIMIC-III dataset. Using LSI, patients were ranked based on conceptual relevance to a set of keywords (lexicons) pertaining to 15 different SBDH categories. For Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) models, API requests were made with a Python script to connect to the OpenAI services in Azure, using gpt-3.5-turbo-1106 and gpt-4-1106-preview models. Prediction of SBDH categories were performed using a logistic regression model that included age, gender, race and SBDH ICD-9 codes. RESULTS: 83%. Using manually curated gold standard (GS) sets for nine SBDH categories, the macro-F1 score of LSI (0.74) was better than ICD-9 (0.71) and GPT-3.5 (0.54), but lower than GPT-4 (0.80). Due to document size limitations, only a subset of the GS cases could be processed by GPT-3.5 (55.8%) and GPT-4 (94.2%), compared to LSI (100%). Using common GS subsets for nine different SBDH categories, the macro-F1 of ICD-9 combined with either LSI (mean 0.88, 95% CI 0.82-0.93), GPT-3.5 (0.86, 0.82-0.91) or GPT-4 (0.88, 0.83-0.94) was not significantly different. After including age, gender, race and ICD-9 in a logistic regression model, the AUC for prediction of six out of the nine SBDH categories was higher for LSI compared to GPT-4.0. CONCLUSIONS: These results demonstrate that the LSI approach performs comparable to more recent large language models, such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.0, when using the same set of documents. Importantly, LSI is robust, deterministic, and does not have document-size limitations or cost implications, which make it more amenable to real-world applications in health systems.
Language: English
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,890
OpenAlex ID: W4403282540
FWCI: 1.331
Cites: 36
Cited by: 9
Related to: 10