Towards BERT-based Automatic ICD Coding: Limitations and Opportunities

Understand

Automatic ICD coding is the task of assigning codes from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) to medical notes.

• These codes describe the state of the patient and have multiple applications, e.g., computer-assisted diagnosis or epidemiological studies.
• ICD coding is a challenging task due to the complexity and length of medical notes.
• Unlike the general trend in language processing, no transformer model has been reported to reach high performance on this task.