Enhancing Antibiotic Stewardship using a Natural Language Approach for Better Feature Representation

SA Lee, T Brokowski, JN Chiang - arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.20419, 2024 - arxiv.org
SA Lee, T Brokowski, JN Chiang
arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.20419, 2024arxiv.org
The rapid emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is recognized as a global healthcare
crisis, undermining the efficacy of life-saving antibiotics. This crisis is driven by the improper
and overuse of antibiotics, which escalates bacterial resistance. In response, this study
explores the use of clinical decision support systems, enhanced through the integration of
electronic health records (EHRs), to improve antibiotic stewardship. However, EHR systems
present numerous data-level challenges, complicating the effective synthesis and utilization …
The rapid emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is recognized as a global healthcare crisis, undermining the efficacy of life-saving antibiotics. This crisis is driven by the improper and overuse of antibiotics, which escalates bacterial resistance. In response, this study explores the use of clinical decision support systems, enhanced through the integration of electronic health records (EHRs), to improve antibiotic stewardship. However, EHR systems present numerous data-level challenges, complicating the effective synthesis and utilization of data. In this work, we transform EHR data into a serialized textual representation and employ pretrained foundation models to demonstrate how this enhanced feature representation can aid in antibiotic susceptibility predictions. Our results suggest that this text representation, combined with foundation models, provides a valuable tool to increase interpretability and support antibiotic stewardship efforts.
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