Natural Language Processing

Principal Investigator: John Pestian, PhD

Oh, if I had a nickle for everytime someone told me the installation of a medical record would transfer all free text to structured, drop-down boxes, I'd be very wealth.  I did an ad-hoc study when CCHMC installed EPIC.  I counted all the fields data fields on the paper forms.  60% were fixed, 40% were free-text.  After the installation, 60% fixed, 40% free-text.   There is a great deal of knowledge in free-text and my lab wants to find how to extract it.  We're particuallarly interested in neuropsychiatric free-text, i.e. suicide, depression, mood-disorder, schizophrenia and so forth. 

John Pestian, PhD, and his research team are attempting to overcome these obstacles by using natural language processing (NLP). Specifically, the group is focused on developing and implementing neuro-cognitive algorithms that enable computers to understand the concepts and semantic relationships within clinical text. Already, the group has developed a tool that anonymizes free-text and has used this tool to create a corpus to support NLP research. The group's next steps include further annotating the existing corpus, developing a second corpus, and using these corpora to train new, memory-based text processing algorithms.

Collaborators

What we do is complicated, but fun.  So we rely on a team of world-class scientist. It includes Christopher Brew, PhD, and DJ Hovermale of The Ohio State University; Wlodzislaw Duch, PhD, of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland; Kevin Cohen of the Center for Computational Pharmacology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center; Max Wiznitzer, MD, of the Case Western University School of Medicine; and Tracy Glauser, MD, Robert Kowatch, MD, Pawel Matykiewucz,  Cindy Prows, MSN, RN, Shannon Saldana, PharmD, Randy Sallee, MD, PhD, Malik Spencer, Erica Steckl, Sander Vinks, PharmD, PhD, FCP, and Kejain Zhang, MD, of Cincinnati Children's.  There's also the folks on the 2011-Challenge team.  Click here to learn about them. 

There's always room for more bright and energetic scientists, too!  We do, however, have two rules.  Rule 1: If you're not having fun, quit.  Rule 2: If we're not having fun when you're around, you have to quit.