Extracting Clinical Entities

Extracting Clinical Entities

openmed.analyze_text runs a token-classification model over medical text and returns structured entities with character offsets and confidence scores. It runs on-device after a one-time model download.

When to use

• Pull diseases, medications, anatomy, genes, proteins, etc. out of clinical text.
• You need exact character spans (start/end) plus confidence per entity.
• You want output as objects, JSON, an HTML highlight view, or CSV.
• You are building the "extract entities" stage of a clinical NLP pipeline.

To choose a model, see choosing-openmed-models. To load it once and reuse it, see loading-openmed-models. In a PHI workflow, de-identify first (see deidentifying-clinical-text), then run NER on the redacted text.

Install

pip install "openmed[hf]"

Quick start

import openmed

note = (
    "Patient prescribed 500 mg metformin for type 2 diabetes mellitus. "
    "Reports intermittent chest pain; ruled out myocardial infarction."
)

result = openmed.analyze_text(
    note,
    model_name="disease_detection_superclinical",  # registry key, HF id, or local path
    output_format="dict",                           # dict | json | html | csv
    confidence_threshold=0.5,
)

for ent in result.entities:
    print(f"{ent.label:12} {ent.text!r:40} {ent.confidence:.2f} [{ent.start}:{ent.end}]")

With output_format="dict" you get a PredictionResult. The fields you use most:

result.text          # the original input text
result.entities      # list of entity objects
result.model_name    # which model produced these
ent.text             # the surface string
ent.label            # entity type, e.g. "DISEASE"
ent.confidence       # model score in [0, 1]   (NOTE: .confidence, not .score)
ent.start / ent.end  # character offsets into result.text

Output formats

analyze_text(...) returns different types depending on output_format:

import openmed

note = "Started atorvastatin 40 mg; history of myocardial infarction."

json_str = openmed.analyze_text(note, output_format="json")
html_str = openmed.analyze_text(note, output_format="html")   # render in a browser
csv_str  = openmed.analyze_text(note, output_format="csv")

Key parameters

openmed.analyze_text(
    text,
    model_name="disease_detection_superclinical",
    output_format="dict",
    confidence_threshold=0.5,    # drop entities below this score; None keeps all
    aggregation_strategy="simple",  # HF subword aggregation; None for raw tokens
    group_entities=False,        # merge adjacent same-label spans into one
    include_confidence=True,     # include scores in formatted output
    sentence_detection=True,     # pySBD sentence splitting (better long-doc spans)
    sentence_language="en",
    loader=None,                 # pass a reused ModelLoader (see loading skill)
)

• confidence_threshold — the most useful knob. Use the model's recommended_confidence (from get_model_info) as a starting point.
• group_entities=True — merges "type", "2", "diabetes" fragments into a single "type 2 diabetes" span. Turn on for cleaner output.
• sentence_detection=True (default) — splits long notes into sentences before inference for more accurate offsets and to respect model max length. Requires pySBD; if unavailable it silently falls back to whole-text inference.

Save results to JSONL

One line per note keeps offsets and labels for downstream grounding or eval:

import json
import openmed

notes = [
    "Type 2 diabetes managed with metformin.",
    "Acute myocardial infarction; started aspirin and atorvastatin.",
]

with open("entities.jsonl", "w", encoding="utf-8") as fh:
    for i, note in enumerate(notes):
        result = openmed.analyze_text(note, output_format="dict")
        fh.write(json.dumps({
            "doc_id": i,
            "text": result.text,
            "model": result.model_name,
            "entities": [
                {"label": e.label, "text": e.text,
                 "start": e.start, "end": e.end,
                 "confidence": round(e.confidence, 4)}
                for e in result.entities
            ],
        }) + "\n")

Store offsets and labels, not extra copies of free text, in PHI contexts.

CLI

openmed analyze --text "Type 2 diabetes managed with metformin." \
  --model disease_detection_superclinical \
  --format json \
  --threshold 0.5 \
  --group

# Or analyze a file:
openmed analyze --input-file note.txt --model disease_detection_superclinical -o csv

Flags: --text/-t, --input-file/-f, --model/-m, --format/-o (dict|json|html|csv), --threshold/-c, --group, --no-confidence, --sentence-detection/--no-sentence-detection.

Hand-off to / from OpenMed

• From loading-openmed-models: pass your reused loader= so a batch loads weights once.

• From deidentifying-clinical-text: run NER on result.deidentified_text, not raw PHI:

  deid = openmed.deidentify(raw_note, method="mask", policy="hipaa_safe_harbor")
  ner  = openmed.analyze_text(deid.deidentified_text, output_format="dict")
  

• To terminology grounding (out-of-process): map ent.text/ent.label to RxNorm / LOINC / SNOMED using the user's own licensed service — OpenMed does not bundle restricted terminologies.

• To batch processing: for large corpora use openmed.process_batch(...) / BatchProcessor (see processing utilities) with a shared loader.

Edge cases & gotchas

• Attribute is .confidence, not .score. Entity objects extend EntityPrediction (text, label, confidence, start, end).
• Right model for the labels. A Disease model won't emit oncology staging or gene labels — pick the category in choosing-openmed-models and check entity_types.
• Offsets index result.text. Slice the original string with start:end; the surface form in ent.text is whitespace-trimmed.
• Long documents: keep sentence_detection=True so chunks respect the model's max length (get_model_max_length); disabling it can truncate long notes.
• NER assists, it does not diagnose. Treat output as decision support; surface a disclaimer for any clinical-facing use.
• No raw PHI in logs. Log labels, offsets, and hashes — never patient text.

Standards & references

• Token classification / NER (Hugging Face): https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/tasks/token_classification
• pySBD sentence boundary detection: https://github.com/nipunsadvilkar/pySBD
• OpenMed model cards: https://huggingface.co/OpenMed