Unsupervised Neural Network for Automated Classification of Surgical Urgency Levels in Medical Transcriptions

TL;DR

This paper presents an unsupervised neural network approach using BioClinicalBERT embeddings and clustering techniques to classify surgical transcriptions into urgency levels, validated by expert review.

Contribution

It introduces a novel unsupervised framework combining domain-specific embeddings, clustering, and neural classification for surgical urgency detection without labeled data.

Findings

DEC clustering outperforms K-means in cluster cohesion

The neural classifier achieves high accuracy and F1-score

Expert validation ensures clinical relevance of clusters

Abstract

Efficient classification of surgical procedures by urgency is paramount to optimize patient care and resource allocation within healthcare systems. This study introduces an unsupervised neural network approach to automatically categorize surgical transcriptions into three urgency levels: immediate, urgent, and elective. Leveraging BioClinicalBERT, a domain-specific language model, surgical transcripts are transformed into high-dimensional embeddings that capture their semantic nuances. These embeddings are subsequently clustered using both K-means and Deep Embedding Clustering (DEC) algorithms, in which DEC demonstrates superior performance in the formation of cohesive and well-separated clusters. To ensure clinical relevance and accuracy, the clustering results undergo validation through the Modified Delphi Method, which involves expert review and refinement. Following validation, a neural network that integrates Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) layers with BioClinicalBERT embeddings is developed for classification tasks. The model is rigorously evaluated using cross-validation and metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, which achieve robust performance and demonstrate strong generalization capabilities on unseen data. This unsupervised framework not only addresses the challenge of limited labeled data but also provides a scalable and reliable solution for real-time surgical prioritization, which ultimately enhances operational efficiency and patient outcomes in dynamic medical environments.