Evolutionary algorithms guided by Erdos-Rényi complex networks.

This article proposes an evolutionary algorithm integrating Erdos-Rényi complex networks to regulate population crossovers, enhancing candidate solution refinement across generations. In this context, the population is conceptualized as a set of interrelated solutions, resembling a complex network. The algorithm enhances solutions by introducing new connections between them, thereby influencing population dynamics and optimizing the problem-solving process. The study conducts experiments comparing four instances of the traditional optimization problem known as the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). These experiments employ the traditional evolutionary algorithm, alternative algorithms utilizing different types of complex networks, and the proposed algorithm. The findings suggest that the approach guided by an Erdos-Rényi dynamic network surpasses the performance of the other algorithms. The proposed model exhibits improved convergence rates and shorter execution times. Thus, strategies based on complex networks reveal that network characteristics provide valuable information for solving optimization problems. Therefore, complex networks can regulate the decision-making process, similar to optimizing problems. This work emphasizes that the network structure is crucial in adding value to decision-making.

Transformers for extracting breast cancer information from Spanish clinical narratives.

The wide adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) offers immense potential as a source of support for clinical research. However, previous studies focused on extracting only a limited set of medical concepts to support information extraction in the cancer domain for the Spanish language. Building on the success of deep learning for processing natural language texts, this paper proposes a transformer-based approach to extract named entities from breast cancer clinical notes written in Spanish and compares several language models. To facilitate this approach, a schema for annotating clinical notes with breast cancer concepts is presented, and a corpus for breast cancer is developed. Results indicate that both BERT-based and RoBERTa-based language models demonstrate competitive performance in clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER). Specifically, BETO and multilingual BERT achieve F-scores of 93.71% and 94.63%, respectively. Additionally, RoBERTa Biomedical attains an F-score of 95.01%, while RoBERTa BNE achieves an F-score of 94.54%. The findings suggest that transformers can feasibly extract information in the clinical domain in the Spanish language, with the use of models trained on biomedical texts contributing to enhanced results. The proposed approach takes advantage of transfer learning techniques by fine-tuning language models to automatically represent text features and avoiding the time-consuming feature engineering process.

Negation and uncertainty detection in clinical texts written in Spanish: a deep learning-based approach.

Detecting negation and uncertainty is crucial for medical text mining applications; otherwise, extracted information can be incorrectly identified as real or factual events. Although several approaches have been proposed to detect negation and uncertainty in clinical texts, most efforts have focused on the English language. Most proposals developed for Spanish have focused mainly on negation detection and do not deal with uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based approach for both negation and uncertainty detection in clinical texts written in Spanish. The proposed approach explores two deep learning methods to achieve this goal: (i) Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory with a Conditional Random Field layer (BiLSTM-CRF) and (ii) Bidirectional Encoder Representation for Transformers (BERT). The approach was evaluated using NUBES and IULA, two public corpora for the Spanish language. The results obtained showed an F-score of 92% and 80% in the scope recognition task for negation and uncertainty, respectively. We also present the results of a validation process conducted using a real-life annotated dataset from clinical notes belonging to cancer patients. The proposed approach shows the feasibility of deep learning-based methods to detect negation and uncertainty in Spanish clinical texts. Experiments also highlighted that this approach improves performance in the scope recognition task compared to other proposals in the biomedical domain.