arXiv AI

SHIELD: A Diverse Clinical Note Dataset and Distilled Small Language Models for Enterprise-Scale De-identification

arXiv:2605. 03301v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: De-identification of clinical text is a prerequisite for the secondary use of electronic health records.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

MedDeID enables locally governed clinical-text de-identification from real or synthetic training data

MedDeID is an on‑premises framework that combines in‑house annotation, synthetic‑note generation, model training, inference, pseudonymisation and evaluation to de‑identify clinical text. On a Dutch hospital benchmark, a hospital‑trained transformer detected 98.9 % of identifying text while redacting only 0.24 % of non‑identifier text; a synthetic‑only model achieved 96.1 %. In primary‑care notes, the synthetic‑trained model outperformed the hospital‑trained model in recall and robustness to identifier‑format changes, and an English version trained without real text reached 99.7 % and 98.9 % detection on synthetic benchmarks.

By Stig Hellemans, Tom Stroobants, Elyne Scheurwegs, Pieter Meysman, Philippe G. Jorens, Kris Laukens
arXiv AI
2d ago

Clinical Note Bloat Reduction for Efficient LLM Use

The paper introduces TRACE, a method that removes duplicated text—known as note bloat—from clinical notes by leveraging EHR metadata and frequency-based de‑duplication. Across 5.3 million notes from diverse patient cohorts, TRACE eliminated 47.3 % of chart text while preserving information extraction and prediction performance, with only 0.3–6.6 % of removed content being author‑generated. The authors project that applying TRACE could yield net savings of $1.00 M to $13.58 M over three years at a large academic center, depending on model pricing schemes.

By Jordan L. Cahoon, Chloe Stanwyck, Asad Aali, Rachel Madding, Sulaiman S. Somani, Emma Sun, Yixing Jiang, Renumathy Dhanasekaran, Emily Alsentzer
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Key Coverage Matters: Semi-Structured Extraction of OCR Clinical Reports

The paper presents a method for extracting key information from OCR‑digitized clinical reports, addressing challenges posed by heterogeneous documents and noisy OCR output. It introduces an open key space that is iteratively mined, normalized, clustered, and verified to build a canonical key inventory, and defines key coverage as a metric for inventory completeness. Experiments on reports from over 20 hospitals using a 0.2B BERT model show that performance improves steadily with key coverage, achieving high F1 scores when the top 90 keys are covered and outperforming a fine‑tuned Qwen3‑0.6B baseline.

By Yu Wang, Yingyun Li, Ying Qin, Haiyang Qian
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Language Specificity vs. Domain Diversity: Benchmarking Transformers for Bangla Medical NER

This study benchmarks transformer models for Bangla medical named entity recognition (NER), comparing BanglaBERT, multilingual BERT (mBERT), XLM‑RoBERTa, and GPT‑4o mini under zero‑shot and few‑shot prompting. Across a full test set of 3,179 samples, fine‑tuned XLM‑RoBERTa achieves a new state‑of‑the‑art F1‑score of 0.5959, while BanglaBERT lags with 0.4937, suggesting that domain diversity outweighs language specificity. The analysis shows high performance on Medicine and Specialist entities (F1 > 0.83) but lower accuracy on Symptoms (F1 0.4367), and demonstrates that fine‑tuned transformers outperform prompt‑only approaches by a factor of 3.76.

By Rakib Abdullah, Md. Maruful Islam Maruf
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Institution-Specific LLM Prompting Recovers PHI That De-identification Systems and Their Gold Standards Both Miss

The study evaluates whether large language models (LLMs) with in‑context learning can better identify institution‑specific protected health information (PHI) in electronic health records than existing de‑identification systems. Using 100 pediatric oncology notes from Texas Children’s Hospital, eight LLMs were compared to two purpose‑built systems and pattern‑based baselines under three progressively specific prompts. The best LLM achieved an F1 score of 0.918, recovering 79% of previously missed PHI categories and reaching a recall of 0.981 after iterative prompt refinement, demonstrating that calibrated single‑pass prompting can close the institutional PHI gap while balancing precision and recall.

By Daniel Palacios, Matthew Brady Neeley, Angel Adetomike Otto, Shalini Dhamodharan, John P. Woodhouse, Chi-fan Lin, Mark Zobeck, Zhandong Liu, Hyun-Hwan Jeong
arXiv AI
Jun 11

Self-Prompting Small Language Models for Privacy-Sensitive Clinical Information Extraction

arXiv:2605. 04221v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Clinical named entity recognition from dental progress notes is challenging because documentation is highly unstructured, domain-specific, and often privacy-sensitive.

By Yao-Shun Chuang, Tushti Mody, Uday Pratap Singh, Shirindokht Shiraz, Chun-Teh Lee, Ryan Brandon, Muhammad F Walji, Xiaoqian Jiang, Bunmi Tokede
arXiv AI
Jun 8

REMEDI: A Benchmark for Retention and Unlearning Evaluation in Multi-label Clinical Disease Inference

arXiv:2606. 07141v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models trained for clinical disease inference are trained on patient data, which may include sensitive and private information, and data owners may request the removal of their data from a trained model due to privacy or copyright concerns.

By Anurag Sharma, Sai Teja Chunchu, Prasenjit Mitra, Sandipan Sikdar, Koustav Rudra
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

Custom Named Entity Recognition and Topic Classification for Global Health Publications

This thesis explores how to select and adapt NLP models for global health literature when annotated data and computational resources are scarce. It compares skip‑gram word2vec models trained on increasingly large specialized corpora with BioWordVec for semantic tag discovery, finding that larger coverage does not always yield more useful domain associations. The study also evaluates convolutional spaCy models versus a RoBERTa transformer for named entity recognition, noting a trade‑off between higher F1 scores and longer inference time, and investigates MiniLM few‑shot versus BART‑MNLI zero‑shot classification for multi‑label topic classification, highlighting practical constraints of inference cost. "whyItMatters":"The work provides empirical guidance on balancing model accuracy and resource demands for building knowledge systems in low‑resource global health settings."

By Genis Skura, Antoine Geissb\"uhler, Jean-Luc Falcone
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Scaling Electronic Health Record Foundation Models for Population Health Management

The paper introduces Scaling Electronic Health Record Foundation Models for Population Health Management, a large‑scale model trained on billions of medical events from over 5 million patients in Taiwan and the United States. By aligning ICD codes across different health systems, the model achieves strong scaling and generalization across 11 chronic disease prediction tasks, outperforming tree‑based, general, and biomedical language models with high sensitivity at 99% specificity. It also demonstrates superior few‑shot performance on the EHRShot benchmark and shows that cross‑system alignment provides a stronger pretraining signal than single‑site duplication in data‑limited scenarios.

By Liwen Sun, Hao-Ren Yao, Ophir Frieder, Xiang Qian, Chenyan Xiong