Application of Transformers based methods in Electronic Medical Records: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract: The combined growth of available data and their unstructured nature has received increased interest in NLP techniques to make value of these data assets since this format is not suitable for statistical analysis. This work presents a systematic literature review of state-of-the-art advances using transformer-based methods on electronic medical records (EMRs) in different NLP tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this work is unique in providing a comprehensive review of research on transformer-based methods for NLP applied to the EMR field. In the initial query, 99 articles were selected from three public databases and filtered into 65 articles for detailed analysis. The papers were analyzed with respect to the business problem, NLP task, models and techniques, availability of datasets, reproducibility of modeling, language, and exchange format. The paper presents some limitations of current research and some recommendations for further research.