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A Cross-document Coreference Dataset for Longitudinal Tracking across Radiology Reports

This paper proposes a new cross-document coreference resolution (CDCR) dataset for identifying co-referring radiological findings and medical devices across a patient’s radiology reports. Our annotated corpus contains 5872 mentions (findings and devices) spanning 638 MIMIC-III radiology reports across 60 patients, covering multiple imaging modalities and anatomies. There are a total of 2292 mention chains. We describe the annotation process in detail, highlighting the complexities involved in creating a sizable and realistic dataset for radiology CDCR. We apply two baseline methods–string matching and transformer language models (BERT)–to identify cross-report coreferences. Our results indicate the requirement of further model development targeting better understanding of domain language and context to address this challenging and unexplored task. This dataset can serve as a resource to develop more advanced natural language processing CDCR methods in the future. This is one of the first attempts focusing on CDCR in the clinical domain and holds potential in benefiting physicians and clinical research through long-term tracking of radiology findings.