Sentence Transformers, which generate semantic embeddings for text, have several practical applications in healthcare and biomedical fields. These models excel at understanding context and meaning in unstructured text, making them useful for tasks like matching patient records to research, automating medical coding, and improving clinical decision support systems. By converting text into numerical vectors, they enable efficient similarity comparisons, information retrieval, and classification without requiring manual feature engineering. Below are three key use cases with specific examples.
One major use case is linking patient notes to medical literature. Clinicians often need to reference the latest research when diagnosing complex cases, but manually searching through thousands of papers is time-consuming. Sentence Transformers can encode both patient notes (e.g., symptoms, lab results) and medical abstracts into vectors. For example, a system could match a note describing “fatigue, weight loss, and hypercalcemia” to relevant studies on parathyroid disorders. This is done by computing cosine similarity between the patient note’s embedding and a pre-indexed database of paper embeddings. Models can be fine-tuned on domain-specific data (e.g., PubMed articles) to improve accuracy. Tools like BioBERT or specialized variants of SBERT are often adapted for this purpose.
Another application is clinical trial recruitment. Identifying eligible patients for trials typically requires manually reviewing electronic health records (EHRs) against trial criteria (e.g., “stage III colon cancer patients with KRAS mutations”). Sentence Transformers can encode both trial eligibility text and patient summaries into vectors, then rank matches. For instance, a patient’s EHR entry mentioning “metastatic CRC, KRAS G12D mutation, no prior anti-EGFR therapy” could be paired with a trial seeking “KRAS-mutated colorectal cancer patients naïve to EGFR inhibitors.” This approach reduces screening time and improves recruitment rates. Developers can implement this using frameworks like Hugging Face’s sentence-transformers, with EHR data anonymized and structured into text snippets for encoding.
A third use case is automating medical coding. Converting unstructured clinical text (e.g., “pt reports chest pain radiating to left arm”) into standardized codes (e.g., ICD-10 R07.9) is error-prone when done manually. Sentence Transformers can map clinical descriptions to code definitions by embedding both and finding the closest match. For example, a model trained on historical coding data could link “elevated CRP and joint stiffness” to “M06.9 (rheumatoid arthritis).” This requires fine-tuning on paired clinical text and code descriptions, often using contrastive loss to distinguish similar codes. Such systems can integrate with EHRs via APIs, providing real-time coding suggestions. Open-source libraries like medcat or custom pipelines with spaCy and Sentence Transformers are common tools for this task.