Capturing Expert Arguments from Medical Adjudication Discussions in a Machine-readable Format

Mike Schaekermann, Graeme Beaton, Minahz Habib, Andrew Lim, Kate Larson, Edith Law

Abstract: Group-based discussion among human graders can be a useful tool to capture sources of disagreement in ambiguous classification tasks and to adjudicate any resolvable disagreements. Existing workflows for panel-based adjudication, however, capture graders’ arguments and rationales in a free-form, unstructured format, limiting the potential for automatic analysis of the discussion contents. We designed and implemented a structured adjudication system that collects graders’ arguments in a machine-readable format without limiting graders’ abilities to provide free-form justifications for their classification decisions. Our system enables graders to cite instructions from a set of labeling guidelines, specified in the form of discrete classification rules and conditions that need to be met in order for each rule to be applicable. In the present work, we outline the process of designing and implementing this adjudication system, and report preliminary findings from deploying our system in the context of medical time series analysis for sleep stage classification.