MultiClinSum Task Info

MultiClinSum challenges participants to create systems that can automatically summarize clinical case reports in four languages: Spanish, English, French and Portuguese. Participants are free to create their systems in any way they want, and the use of creative solutions is encouraged. Each language will be evaluated independently, and participants are allowed to use any resources they find online as long as they report it.

  • If you want to learn about the relevance of automatic summarization for clinical documents, check the Motivation page.
  • For more information and examples about the different subtasks, check the Subtasks page.
  • To keep up with all important dates and the task timing, check the Schedule page.
  • If you want to participate, check the Registration page.
  • If you want to submit your results, check the Submission page.

Generation of text summaries is a highly complex task, even for humans which makes it also challenging for evaluation scenarios to determine summary quality analysis. In the case of clinical case report publications, consisting of  a type of medical or scientific article that describes and analyzes the diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes of a single patient (or a small number of patients) there are key aspects that a good clinical case report, and thus also as well as case summaries needs to describe. Clinical case reports are also overall very similar to discharge summary clinical records, making them an ideal data type to exploit publicly accessible content for clinical language technology tool development.

Key features of clinical case reports and summaries typically include:

  1. Patient presentation: demographics like age, sex or ethnicity (if relevant), occupation, relevant medical history.
  2. Clinical presentation: Symptoms and signs that led the patient to seek medical help.
  3. Diagnosis / Diagnostic process: Tests and procedures used to arrive at a diagnosis. How the diagnosis was reached, including differential diagnoses.
  4. Intervention / Treatment / Management: Medications, surgeries, therapies, or interventions used, including lab tests, imaging, pathology, and other diagnostics

Outcome and follow-up: Patient’s response and long-term results, duration and current status of the patient.