Natural language processing: algorithms and tools to extract computable information from EHRs and from the biomedical literature
Lucila Ohno‐Machado, Prakash M. Nadkarni, Kevin K. Johnson · Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association · 2013
The increasing adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) and the corresponding interest in using these data for quality improvement and research have made it clear that the interpretation of narrative text contained in the records is a critical step. The biomedical literature is another important information source that can benefit from approaches requiring structuring of data contained in narrative text. For the first time, we dedicate an entire issue of JAMIA to biomedical natural language processing (NLP), a topic that has been among the most cited in this journal for the past few years. We start with a description of a contest to select the best performing algorithms for detection of temporal relationships in clinical documents (see page 806), followed by a general review of significance and brief description of commonly used methods to address this task (see page 814). Top performing approaches are featured in seven articles from five different countries—Canada (see page 843), China (see page 849), France (see page 820), Serbia (see page 859), and the US (see page 828, 836, 867).