Mendel Team
January 30, 2023

How to Approach Document Categorization

Introduction

AI projects have created tangible results for a wide range of industries. Despite the innovation, it is important to remember that AI is not a magic wand that will solve every problem in every industry with a single wave. 

At Mendel, our AI development is informed by three core values: trust, transparency, and learning. We hope sharing our approach will help healthcare organizations find the right tools for the right use cases.

The Mendel Approach

The Mendel pipeline is the core of our AI Driven data processing product. The pipeline leverages a combination of deep learning algorithms and several rule based systems, including our proprietary medical ontology. 

Today we will discuss Rectify. Rectify is Mendel’s document segmentation and categorization engine. In this video, Thiago Santos, AI Engineer, takes to the white board to get under the hood of this module.

Do you have questions around Rectify and Mendel’s approach? Reach out and join the conversation at hello@mendel.ai.

The Feed

Updates

Improving Clinical Trial Participant Prescreening With Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Comparison of the Results of AI Assisted vs Standard Methods in 3 Oncology Trials

Improving Clinical Trial Participant Prescreening With Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Comparison of the Results of AI Assisted vs Standard Methods in 3 Oncology Trials

Delays in clinical trial enrollment and difficulties enrolling representative samples continue to vex sponsors, sites, and patient populations. Here we investigated use of an artificial intelligence-powered technology, Mendel.ai, as a means of overcoming bottlenecks and potential biases associated with standard patient prescreening processes in an oncology setting.

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Updates

Coupling Symbolic Reasoning with Language Modeling for Efficient Longitudinal Understanding of Unstructured Electronic Medical Records

Coupling Symbolic Reasoning with Language Modeling for Efficient Longitudinal Understanding of Unstructured Electronic Medical Records

The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare has been revolutionary, especially with the recent advancements in transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the task of understanding unstructured electronic medical records remains a challenge given the nature of the records (e.g., disorganization, inconsistency, and redundancy) and the inability of LLMs to derive reasoning paradigms that allow for comprehensive understanding of medical variables. In this work, we examine the power of coupling symbolic reasoning with language modeling toward improved understanding of unstructured clinical texts. We show that such a combination improves the extraction of several medical variables from unstructured records. In addition, we show that the state-of-the-art commercially-free LLMs enjoy retrieval capabilities comparable to those provided by their commercial counterparts. Finally, we elaborate on the need for LLM steering through the application of symbolic reasoning as the exclusive use of LLMs results in the lowest performance.

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Updates

Mendel’s New Look: Website Update

Mendel’s New Look: Website Update

We’ve changed our look. Our goal remains the same: make medicine objective. The new site highlights the way our proprietary AI enables organizations to achieve quality and scale when structuring unstructured data. It comes down supercharging your clinical abstraction. We’ve validated that our human in the loop abstraction approach can support a machine that understands medical context like a physician. In our own experiments, the number of variables needing correction decreased by 40%. High quality abstraction = high quality data for cohort selection, real-world evidence, and registries. 

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Case study

How a diagnostic company was able to build a clinico-genomic database in a week

How a diagnostic company was able to build a clinico-genomic database in a week

The customer, a key player in the genomics space, had a strategic initiative to build a clinic genomic database to support their life sciences customers.

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Case study

How One Organization Changed The Way Patients are Identified for Clinical Trials with AI

How One Organization Changed The Way Patients are Identified for Clinical Trials with AI

One clinical trial organization was using manual chart review and was looking to reduce the time it takes to find eligible patients.

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From the Desk of the AI Team

How to Approach De-Identification

How to Approach De-Identification

Organizations that use patient data for internal or external research need to take steps to prevent the exposure of PHI to those who are not authorized to view it. They do this by redacting specific categories of identifiers from every patient document. Once the identifiers are masked, the risk profile of these datasets is significantly reduced. But how do you ensure that redaction engines are working to the highest accuracy?

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Team Retreat

Mendel Retreat: Adventures and Team Building in Cairo

Mendel Retreat: Adventures and Team Building in Cairo

The Mendel team is still buzzing from our week-long retreat in Cairo. The theme of the retreat was “coming together” and it was the first time the American and other remote employees were united with their Egyptian counterparts. Although there were many adventures–missing flights, seeing the pyramids, haggling at Khan el-Khalili–the highlight of the trip was collaborating together, as one global organization. 

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Competence via comprehension

AI for healthcare needs clinical reasoning skills

AI for healthcare needs clinical reasoning skills

Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in the healthcare industry. But to fully leverage the potential of AI, it must be equipped with clinical reasoning skills - the ability to truly comprehend clinical data, or in other words, to read it as a doctor would. When it comes to data processing tools, only a tool capable of clinical reasoning can effectively process unstructured clinical data. 

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Webinar

Large Language Models

Large Language Models

Sailu Challapalli, our Chief Product Officer, spoke at a recent Harvard Business School Healthcare panel. The event brought together different healthcare and AI experts to discuss large language models and their impact.

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Abstractor Spotlight

Shanna Wells, Clinical Abstractor

Shanna Wells, Clinical Abstractor

Manually abstracting patient data at scale is an herculean task for humans alone. It is slow, expensive, difficult, and requires extreme precision and accuracy. Organizations have to choose between breadth and depth when it comes to making data useful for decision making. Because of these challenges, the Mendel team created Carbon. Carbon is an easy to use workspace that allows clinical abstraction teams to efficiently curate high quality clinical datasets at scale. The foundation of Carbon is Mendel’s AI. Carbon pulls directly from Mendel’s AI platform to give abstractors a headstart in identifying relevant data elements within a patient’s chart.

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Gold evaluation

Creating Accurate Regulatory and Reference Data

Creating Accurate Regulatory and Reference Data

Within the real world evidence space, the generally accepted process for creating a regulatory grade data set is to have two human abstractors work with the same set of documents and bring in a third reviewer to adjudicate the differences. These datasets also serve a second purpose - as a reference standard against which the performance of human abstractors can be measured. Although this remains the industry standard, it is expensive, time consuming and difficult to scale.

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From the Desk of the AI Team

How to Approach Document Categorization

How to Approach Document Categorization

AI projects have created tangible results for a wide range of industries. Despite the innovation, it is important to remember that AI is not a magic wand that will solve every problem in every industry with a single wave.

Read →