Extracting Semantics from Clinical Text

Event Date: 
Monday, 9 June, 2014 - 13:00
Location: 
IBMI
Lecturer: 
Assist Prof Meliha Yetisgen, PhD

There is a great amount of information captured in physicians’ comments made during health care. Increasingly, researchers are finding valuable uses by mining and aggregating this data in clinical and translational studies which lead to improved patient care. However, most patient information that describes patient state, diagnostic procedures, and disease progress is represented in free-text form. For meaningful use, one of the challenges is to capture the rich semantics surrounding the medical concepts in partially structured clinical text. In this talk, I will first summarize my past research on statistical section segmentation to extract the structure of clinical notes and assertion analysis to capture the semantics surrounding the medical concepts. I will present clinical application examples where these more sophisticated semantic representation approaches were proven to be more effective compared to the baseline bag-of-words approach.  I will conclude with my ongoing research on clinical event extraction with change-of-state and my future research directions.

About IBMI

Institute for Biostatistics and Medical Informatics (IBMI), formerly Institute for BioMedical Informatics (so still IBMI) was founded by the Faculty of Medicine as a result of a need for a unit which would perform, or coordinate, tasks related to data analysis and providing information, relevant for research in medicine. The programme of the institute, and its development, have been adjusting thorugh time to changes in financing and technological progress, but the basic aim remain the same: to support research in medicine. This is achieved through the following tasks:

Contact

Institute for Biostatistics and Medical Informatics
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Medicine
Vrazov trg 2, 1000 Ljubljana
Slovenia

tel: +386 1 543-77-70
fax: +386 1 543-77-71
email: ibmi (at) mf.uni-lj.si