📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

Clinical notes contain rich clinical narratives but their unstructured format poses challenges for large-scale analysis. Standardized terminologies such as SNOMED CT improve interoperability, yet understanding how concepts relate through co-occurrence and semantic similarity remains underexplored. In this study, we leverage the MIMIC-IV database to investigate the relationship between SNOMED CT concept co-occurrence patterns and embedding-based semantic similarity. Using Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information (NPMI) and pretrained embeddings (e.g., ClinicalBERT, BioBERT), we examine whether frequently co-occurring concepts are also semantically close, whether embeddings can suggest missing concepts, and how these relationships evolve temporally and across specialties. Our analyses reveal that while co-occurrence and semantic similarity are weakly correlated, embeddings capture clinically meaningful associations not always reflected in documentation frequency. Embedding-based suggestions frequently matched concepts later documented, supporting their utility for augmenting clinical annotations. Clustering of concept embeddings yielded coherent clinical themes (symptoms, labs, diagnoses, cardiovascular conditions) that map to patient phenotypes and care patterns. Finally, co-occurrence patterns linked to outcomes such as mortality and readmission demonstrate the practical utility of this approach. Collectively, our findings highlight the complementary value of co-occurrence statistics and semantic embeddings in improving documentation completeness, uncovering latent clinical relationships, and informing decision support and phenotyping applications.