Natural Language Processing: Methods and Applications in the Medical Domain

ABSTRACT: Over the past few decades, the growing use of electronic health records (EHRs) systems has established large, practice-based clinical datasets that are emerging as valuable resources for clinical and translational research. One of the major challenges of using EHRs for clinical research is that much of the detailed patient information is embedded in narrative reports. This presentation will describe recent developments of natural language processing (NLP) methods for extracting phenotypic information from clinical text in EHRs, as well as how such NLP methods can be used to support clinical research such as drug outcome studies.