Explainable clinical coding with in-domain adapted transformers

Guillermo López-García, José M. Jerez, Nuria Ribelles, Emilio Alba, Francisco J. Veredas

Abstract: Highlights•Automatic clinical coding is crucial for extracting information from medical records.•Most of the existing computer-based methods for clinical coding act as “black boxes”.•We have developed two different approaches to tackle explainable clinical coding using transformers.•In-domain adapted transformers following our hierarchical-task strategy establish new state-of-the-art performance for explainable clinical coding tasks.•The proposed methodology can also be applied to address other medical tasks involving both the detection and normalization of clinical entities.