scholarly journals Year 2020 (with COVID): Observation of Scientific Literature on Clinical Natural Language Processing

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (01) ◽  
pp. 257-263
Author(s):  
Natalia Grabar ◽  
Cyril Grouin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Clinical Natural Language Processing ◽  
Selection Of

Summary Objectives: To analyze the content of publications within the medical NLP domain in 2020. Methods: Automatic and manual preselection of publications to be reviewed, and selection of the best NLP papers of the year. Analysis of the important issues. Results: Three best papers have been selected in 2020. We also propose an analysis of the content of the NLP publications in 2020, all topics included. Conclusion: The two main issues addressed in 2020 are related to the investigation of COVID-related questions and to the further adaptation and use of transformer models. Besides, the trends from the past years continue, such as diversification of languages processed and use of information from social networks

scholarly journals Clinical Natural Language Processing in 2015: Leveraging the Variety of Texts of Clinical Interest

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (01) ◽  
pp. 234-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Zweigenbaum ◽  
A. Névéol ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Clinical Information ◽  
Bibliographic Databases ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Clinical Interest ◽  
Clinical Natural Language Processing ◽  
Selection Of

Summary Objective: To summarize recent research and present a selection of the best papers published in 2015 in the field of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP). Method: A systematic review of the literature was performed by the two section editors of the IMIA Yearbook NLP section by searching bibliographic databases with a focus on NLP efforts applied to clinical texts or aimed at a clinical outcome. Section editors first selected a shortlist of candidate best papers that were then peer-reviewed by independent external reviewers. Results: The clinical NLP best paper selection shows that clinical NLP is making use of a variety of texts of clinical interest to contribute to the analysis of clinical information and the building of a body of clinical knowledge. The full review process highlighted five papers analyzing patient-authored texts or seeking to connect and aggregate multiple sources of information. They provide a contribution to the development of methods, resources, applications, and sometimes a combination of these aspects. Conclusions: The field of clinical NLP continues to thrive through the contributions of both NLP researchers and healthcare professionals interested in applying NLP techniques to impact clinical practice. Foundational progress in the field makes it possible to leverage a larger variety of texts of clinical interest for healthcare purposes.

scholarly journals Cohort Selection for Construction of a Clinical Natural Language Processing Corpus

2021 ◽  
pp. 100024
Author(s):  
Naga Lalitha Valli ALLA ◽  
Aipeng CHEN ◽  
Sean BATONGBACAL ◽  
Chandini NEKKANTTI ◽  
Hong-Jie Dai ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Cohort Selection ◽  
Selection For ◽  
Clinical Natural Language Processing

scholarly journals Toward a clinical text encoder: pretraining for clinical natural language processing with applications to substance misuse

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (11) ◽  
pp. 1272-1278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitriy Dligach ◽  
Majid Afshar ◽  
Timothy Miller
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Substance Misuse ◽  
Research Direction ◽  
Clinical Text ◽  
Universal Properties ◽  
Classification Tasks ◽  
Performance Gains ◽  
Clinical Natural Language Processing

Abstract Objective Our objective is to develop algorithms for encoding clinical text into representations that can be used for a variety of phenotyping tasks. Materials and Methods Obtaining large datasets to take advantage of highly expressive deep learning methods is difficult in clinical natural language processing (NLP). We address this difficulty by pretraining a clinical text encoder on billing code data, which is typically available in abundance. We explore several neural encoder architectures and deploy the text representations obtained from these encoders in the context of clinical text classification tasks. While our ultimate goal is learning a universal clinical text encoder, we also experiment with training a phenotype-specific encoder. A universal encoder would be more practical, but a phenotype-specific encoder could perform better for a specific task. Results We successfully train several clinical text encoders, establish a new state-of-the-art on comorbidity data, and observe good performance gains on substance misuse data. Discussion We find that pretraining using billing codes is a promising research direction. The representations generated by this type of pretraining have universal properties, as they are highly beneficial for many phenotyping tasks. Phenotype-specific pretraining is a viable route for trading the generality of the pretrained encoder for better performance on a specific phenotyping task. Conclusions We successfully applied our approach to many phenotyping tasks. We conclude by discussing potential limitations of our approach.

scholarly journals CLAMP – a toolkit for efficiently building customized clinical natural language processing pipelines

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ergin Soysal ◽  
Jingqi Wang ◽  
Min Jiang ◽  
Yonghui Wu ◽  
Serguei Pakhomov ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
User Interface ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
High Performance ◽  
Smoking Status ◽  
Entity Recognition ◽  
Graphic User Interface ◽  
Clinical Text ◽  
Clinical Natural Language Processing

Abstract Existing general clinical natural language processing (NLP) systems such as MetaMap and Clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System have been successfully applied to information extraction from clinical text. However, end users often have to customize existing systems for their individual tasks, which can require substantial NLP skills. Here we present CLAMP (Clinical Language Annotation, Modeling, and Processing), a newly developed clinical NLP toolkit that provides not only state-of-the-art NLP components, but also a user-friendly graphic user interface that can help users quickly build customized NLP pipelines for their individual applications. Our evaluation shows that the CLAMP default pipeline achieved good performance on named entity recognition and concept encoding. We also demonstrate the efficiency of the CLAMP graphic user interface in building customized, high-performance NLP pipelines with 2 use cases, extracting smoking status and lab test values. CLAMP is publicly available for research use, and we believe it is a unique asset for the clinical NLP community.

scholarly journals Making Sense of Big Textual Data for Health Care: Findings from the Section on Clinical Natural Language Processing

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (01) ◽  
pp. 228-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Névéol ◽  
P. Zweigenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Bibliographic Databases ◽  
Coreference Resolution ◽  
Gradable Adjectives ◽  
Research Results ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Textual Data ◽  
Clinical Natural Language Processing

Summary Objectives: To summarize recent research and present a selection of the best papers published in 2016 in the field of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP). Method: A survey of the literature was performed by the two section editors of the IMIA Yearbook NLP section. Bibliographic databases were searched for papers with a focus on NLP efforts applied to clinical texts or aimed at a clinical outcome. Papers were automatically ranked and then manually reviewed based on titles and abstracts. A shortlist of candidate best papers was first selected by the section editors before being peer-reviewed by independent external reviewers. Results: The five clinical NLP best papers provide a contribution that ranges from emerging original foundational methods to transitioning solid established research results to a practical clinical setting. They offer a framework for abbreviation disambiguation and coreference resolution, a classification method to identify clinically useful sentences, an analysis of counseling conversations to improve support to patients with mental disorder and grounding of gradable adjectives. Conclusions: Clinical NLP continued to thrive in 2016, with an increasing number of contributions towards applications compared to fundamental methods. Fundamental work addresses increasingly complex problems such as lexical semantics, coreference resolution, and discourse analysis. Research results translate into freely available tools, mainly for English.

scholarly journals Assessing the Performance of Clinical Natural Language Processing Systems: Development of an Evaluation Methodology

10.2196/20492 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. e20492
Author(s):  
Lea Canales ◽  
Sebastian Menke ◽  
Stephanie Marchesseau ◽  
Ariel D’Agostino ◽  
Carlos del Rio-Bermudez ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Gold Standard ◽  
Performance Metrics ◽  
Evaluation Methodology ◽  
Free Text ◽  
Use Case ◽  
Five Phases ◽  
Clinical Natural Language Processing

Background Clinical natural language processing (cNLP) systems are of crucial importance due to their increasing capability in extracting clinically important information from free text contained in electronic health records (EHRs). The conversion of a nonstructured representation of a patient’s clinical history into a structured format enables medical doctors to generate clinical knowledge at a level that was not possible before. Finally, the interpretation of the insights gained provided by cNLP systems has a great potential in driving decisions about clinical practice. However, carrying out robust evaluations of those cNLP systems is a complex task that is hindered by a lack of standard guidance on how to systematically approach them. Objective Our objective was to offer natural language processing (NLP) experts a methodology for the evaluation of cNLP systems to assist them in carrying out this task. By following the proposed phases, the robustness and representativeness of the performance metrics of their own cNLP systems can be assured. Methods The proposed evaluation methodology comprised five phases: (1) the definition of the target population, (2) the statistical document collection, (3) the design of the annotation guidelines and annotation project, (4) the external annotations, and (5) the cNLP system performance evaluation. We presented the application of all phases to evaluate the performance of a cNLP system called “EHRead Technology” (developed by Savana, an international medical company), applied in a study on patients with asthma. As part of the evaluation methodology, we introduced the Sample Size Calculator for Evaluations (SLiCE), a software tool that calculates the number of documents needed to achieve a statistically useful and resourceful gold standard. Results The application of the proposed evaluation methodology on a real use-case study of patients with asthma revealed the benefit of the different phases for cNLP system evaluations. By using SLiCE to adjust the number of documents needed, a meaningful and resourceful gold standard was created. In the presented use-case, using as little as 519 EHRs, it was possible to evaluate the performance of the cNLP system and obtain performance metrics for the primary variable within the expected CIs. Conclusions We showed that our evaluation methodology can offer guidance to NLP experts on how to approach the evaluation of their cNLP systems. By following the five phases, NLP experts can assure the robustness of their evaluation and avoid unnecessary investment of human and financial resources. Besides the theoretical guidance, we offer SLiCE as an easy-to-use, open-source Python library.

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