Clinical Text Analysis Using Interactive Natural Language Processing

Update: Here’s our full paper announcement with source-code release…

I am working on a project to support the use of Natural Language Processing in the clinical domain. Modern NLP systems often make use of machine learning techniques. However, physicians and other clinicians, who are interested in analyzing clinical records, may be unfamiliar with these methods. Our project aims to enable such domain experts make use of Natural Language Processing using a point-and-click interface . It combines novel text-visualizations to help its users make sense of NLP results, revise models and understand changes between revisions. It allows them to make any necessary corrections to computed results, thus forming a feedback loop and helping improve the accuracy of the models.

Here’s the walk-through video of the prototype tool that we have built:

At this point we are redesigning some portions of our tool based on feedback from a formative user study with physicians and clinical researchers. Our next step would be to conduct an empirical evaluation of the tool to test our hypotheses about its design goals.

We will be presenting a demo of our tool at the AMIA Summit on Clinical Research Informatics and also at the ACM IUI Workshop on Visual Text Analytics in March.

References

1. Gaurav Trivedi. 2015. Clinical Text Analysis Using Interactive Natural Language Processing. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces Companion (IUI Companion ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 113-116. DOI 10.1145/2732158.2732162 [Presentation] [PDF]
2. Gaurav Trivedi, Phuong Pham, Wendy Chapman, Rebecca Hwa, Janyce Wiebe, Harry Hochheiser. 2015. An Interactive Tool for Natural Language Processing on Clinical Text. Presented at 4th Workshop on Visual Text Analytics (IUI TextVis 2015), Atlanta. http://vialab.science.uoit.ca/textvis2015/ [PDF]

3. Gaurav Trivedi, Phuong Pham, Wendy Chapman, Rebecca Hwa, Janyce Wiebe, and Harry Hochheiser. 2015. Bridging the Natural Language Processing Gap: An Interactive Clinical Text Review Tool. Poster presented at the 2015 AMIA Summit on Clinical Research Informatics (CRI 2015). San Francisco. March 2015. [Poster][Abstract]