ChatICD: Prompt Learning for Few-shot ICD Coding through ChatGPT

Automated International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding involves the automated assignment of diverse disease codes to clinical medical texts. It is considered as a multi-label classification task. Because most ICD codes are rare, the imbalanced distribution and small sample size issue make this task challenging. Inspired by the recent success of ChatGPT and prompt-based fine-tuning, this study proposes a model called ChatICD to address the issue of few-shot ICD coding. First, ChatGPT for data augumentation rephrases the descriptions of ICD codes into multiple samples. Then, ChatICD fine-tunes the pretrained model by generating prompt templates and label mapping words. We conduct an evaluation of ChatICD on benchmark datasets, namely MIMIC-III-50 and MIMIC-III-rare50. On the few-shot ICD coding task of MIMIC-III-rare50, ChatICD achieves macro-F1 and micro-F1 of 35.8% and 38.2% respectively, which is a 5.4% and 5.6% improvement over the current best model.