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arXiv · 2504.12494

Accelerating Clinical NLP at Scale with a Hybrid Framework with Reduced GPU Demands: A Case Study in Dementia Identification

Jianlin Shi·Qiwei Gan·Elizabeth Hanchrow·Annie Bowles·John Stanley·Adam P. Bress·Jordana B. Cohen·Patrick R. Alba
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Abstract

Clinical natural language processing (NLP) is increasingly in demand in both clinical research and operational practice. However, most of the state-of-the-art solutions are transformers-based and require high computational resources, limiting their accessibility. We propose a hybrid NLP framework that integrates rule-based filtering, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, and a BERT-based model to improve efficiency while maintaining accuracy. We applied this framework in a dementia identification case study involving 4.9 million veterans with incident hypertension, analyzing 2.1 billion clinical notes. At the patient level, our method achieved a precision of 0.90, a recall of 0.84, and an F1-score of 0.87. Additionally, this NLP approach identified over three times as many dementia cases as structured data methods. All processing was completed in approximately two weeks using a single machine with dual A40 GPUs. This study demonstrates the feasibility of hybrid NLP solutions for large-scale clinical text analysis, making state-of-the-art methods more accessible to healthcare organizations with limited computational resources.

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Jianlin Shi, Qiwei Gan, Elizabeth Hanchrow, Annie Bowles, John Stanley, Adam P. Bress, Jordana B. Cohen, Patrick R. Alba. 2025-04-16. Accelerating Clinical NLP at Scale with a Hybrid Framework with Reduced GPU Demands: A Case Study in Dementia Identification. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12494

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