P. Rabaey
Publications
Towards Error-Free EHRs: Reasoning-Intensive Consistency Verification Between Clinical Notes and Structured Tables in Electronic Health Records
Data consistency between unstructured clinical notes and structured tables in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is essential for patient safety and clinical decision-making. However, existing work on note-table consistency verification mainly relies on surface-level matching of numeric values or simple events. Such approaches fail to capture the reasoning underlying real-world EHR documentation, including clinical interpretation, event relations, and temporal changes. To address this gap, we introduce EHR-ReasonCon, a reasoning-intensive benchmark for note-table consistency verification. Built on MIMIC-III with expert-guided annotations, it comprises 8,048 entities derived from clinical notes and provides high-quality ground-truth labels. The annotation protocol is supported by specialized table-exploration tools to ensure systematic evidence retrieval and reliable consistency assessment. We also propose EHR-Inspector, an LLM-based framework that segments notes, extracts anchor entities and temporal references, and uses table-exploration tools to verify consistency against structured tables. Evaluated using expert-validated LLM-as-a-judge metrics under harsh and lenient criteria, EHR-Inspector achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple model backbones. Analyses further demonstrate the effectiveness of its components and highlight differences from human verification.
From Text to Treatment Effects: A Meta-Learning Approach to Handling Text-Based Confounding
One of the central goals of causal machine learning is the accurate estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects from observational data. In recent years, meta-learning has emerged as a flexible, model-agnostic paradigm for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) using any supervised model. This paper examines the performance of meta-learners when the confounding variables are expressed in text. Through synthetic data experiments, we show that learners using pre-trained text representations of confounders, in addition to tabular background variables, achieve improved CATE estimates compared to those relying solely on the tabular variables, particularly when sufficient data is available. However, due to the entangled nature of the text embeddings, these models do not fully match the performance of meta-learners with perfect confounder knowledge. These findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of pre-trained text representations for causal inference and open up interesting avenues for future research.