Medical Text Classification Using Hybrid Deep Learning Models with Multihead Attention

Abstract

To unlock information present in clinical description, automatic medical text classification is highly useful in the arena of natural language processing (NLP). For medical text classification tasks, machine learning techniques seem to be quite effective; however, it requires extensive effort from human side, so that the labeled training data can be created. For clinical and translational research, a huge quantity of detailed patient information, such as disease status, lab tests, medication history, side effects, and treatment outcomes, has been collected in an electronic format, and it serves as a valuable data source for further analysis. Therefore, a huge quantity of detailed patient information is present in the medical text, and it is quite a huge challenge to process it efficiently. In this work, a medical text classification paradigm, using two novel deep learning architectures, is proposed to mitigate the human efforts. The first approach is that a quad channel hybrid long short-term memory (QC-LSTM) deep learning model is implemented utilizing four channels, and the second approach is that a hybrid bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) deep learning model with multihead attention is developed and implemented successfully. The proposed methodology is validated on two medical text datasets, and a comprehensive analysis is conducted. The best results in terms of classification accuracy of 96.72% is obtained with the proposed QC-LSTM deep learning model, and a classification accuracy of 95.76% is obtained with the proposed hybrid BiGRU deep learning model.