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Emma Weiss

Publications and source records attributed to Emma Weiss.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Multilingual Artificial Datasets for AI-Driven Cardiology: the CliTe and ParaCliTe corpora

Background and Aims. Comparable, multilingual, validated cardiology corpora are critical to advance trustworthy natural language processing (NLP) models for cardiology but such resources are scarce due to privacy concerns. This study aimed to cover this gap by presenting suitable artificial corpus creation guidelines and by releasing 3 multilanguage corpora. Methods. Following purpose-specific publicly-available corpus construction guidelines, cardiologists from 7 European hospitals generated artificial clinical records in Czech, Dutch, English, Italian, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish, ensuring clinical diversity and sex balance, resulting in the CliTe corpus. A CliTe subset underwent a multi-stage manual translation into the other 6 languages, resulting in the parallel ParaCliTe corpus, while the remaining reports were automatically translated, constituting ParaCliTe Silver. Results. CliTe is a collection of 699 artificial cardiology reports, mostly outpatient notes (340 documents), discharge reports (263), and inpatient notes (89), describing fictional patients with ischaemic heart disease (199 patients), heart failure (188), and valvular disease (79), among others. ParaCliTe contains reports from 94 fictitious patients, each available in seven languages with sentence-level alignment, resulting in 658 documents. The corpus mainly comprises discharge reports (322 documents), and outpatient (196) and inpatient (140) notes, describing patients with heart failure (399 documents), ischaemic heart disease (287), and valvular disease (238). Empirical results illustrate the utility of ParaCliTe and highlight the limitations of state-of-the-art NLP models adapted to the cardiology domain. Conclusions. The creation of multilingual, equitable and realistic corpora of artificial patients capable of strengthening NLP performance for cardiology is feasible when supported by detailed guidelines.

cs.CL↗

CardioLM: A multilingual suite of small language models for the cardiology domain

Background: Cardiovascular care generates large volumes of clinical free-text documentation in local languages. However, clinical natural language processing (NLP) resources remain concentrated in English, and no existing benchmark is cardiology-specific, multilingual, and broad in entity coverage. Methods: We present two contributions. The first is CardioCCC, a corpus of 508 cardiology case reports originally published in Spanish and extended to Czech, Dutch, English, Italian, Romanian, and Swedish through machine translation, annotation projection, and clinician review, with annotations covering diseases, symptoms, procedures, and medications. The second is CardioLM, comprising CardioBERTa, a set of language-specific encoders obtained by continued pretraining on cardiology and biomedical corpora, and CardioNER, a set of named entity recognition (NER) models fine-tuned on CardioCCC. Results: Cardiology-specific pretraining reduced pseudo-perplexity by up to a factor of eight, yet changed strict span-level F1 by at most 0.04, with benefits concentrated in languages whose backbones lacked biomedical coverage. The jointly trained multilingual XLM-RoBERTa-large models achieved the best strict F1 in nearly every language and entity type, exceeding the strongest monolingual system by up to 0.13 F1. A large share of residual errors concerned boundary detection: relaxed matching recovered 0.10-0.23 F1 for disease, procedure, and symptom, but only 0.01-0.07 for medication. Clinicians rated CardioNER well above a rule- and dictionary-based baseline, with the mean rating across entity types rising from 26% to 73%. Conclusions: Specialty-specific pretraining is not the decisive factor for downstream entity recognition, whereas multilingual joint training yields the strongest results in nearly all settings and a simpler deployment path for multi-country clinical information extraction.

cs.CL↗

Deep Neural Networks for ECG-free Cardiac Phase and End-Diastolic Frame Detection on Coronary Angiographies

Invasive coronary angiography (ICA) is the gold standard in Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) imaging. Detection of the end-diastolic frame (EDF) and, in general, cardiac phase detection on each temporal frame of a coronary angiography acquisition is of significant importance for the anatomical and non-invasive functional assessment of CAD. This task is generally performed via manual frame selection or semi-automated selection based on simultaneously acquired ECG signals - thus introducing the requirement of simultaneous ECG recordings. We evaluate the performance of a purely image based workflow based on deep neural networks for fully automated cardiac phase and EDF detection on coronary angiographies. A first deep neural network (DNN), trained to detect coronary arteries, is employed to preselect a subset of frames in which coronary arteries are well visible. A second DNN predicts cardiac phase labels for each frame. Only in the training and evaluation phases for the second DNN, ECG signals are used to provide ground truth labels for each angiographic frame. The networks were trained on 17800 coronary angiographies from 3900 patients and evaluated on 27900 coronary angiographies from 6250 patients. No exclusion criteria related to patient state, previous interventions, or pathology were formulated. Cardiac phase detection had an accuracy of 97.6%, a sensitivity of 97.6% and a specificity of 97.5% on the evaluation set. EDF prediction had a precision of 97.4% and a recall of 96.9%. Several sub-group analyses were performed, indicating that the cardiac phase detection performance is largely independent from acquisition angles and the heart rate of the patient. The average execution time of cardiac phase detection for one angiographic series was on average less than five seconds on a standard workstation.

cs.CV↗