Open Access
Yearb Med Inform 2016; 25(01): 224-233
DOI: 10.15265/IY-2016-017
IMIA and Schattauer GmbH
Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart

Aspiring to Unintended Consequences of Natural Language Processing: A Review of Recent Developments in Clinical and Consumer-Generated Text Processing

D. Demner-Fushman*
1   National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA
,
N. Elhadad*
2   Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
› Author Affiliations
Further Information

Correspondence to:

Dina Demner-Fushman
National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health
Bldg. 38A, Room 10S-1022
8600 Rockville Pike MSC-3824
Bethesda, MD 20894, USA
Phone: +1 301 435 5320   
Fax: +1 301 402 0341   

Publication History

10 November 2016

Publication Date:
06 March 2018 (online)

 

Summary

Objectives: This paper reviews work over the past two years in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applied to clinical and consumer-generated texts.

Methods: We included any application or methodological publication that leverages text to facilitate healthcare and address the health-related needs of consumers and populations.

Results: Many important developments in clinical text processing, both foundational and task-oriented, were addressed in community-wide evaluations and discussed in corresponding special issues that are referenced in this review. These focused issues and in-depth reviews of several other active research areas, such as pharmacovigilance and summarization, allowed us to discuss in greater depth disease modeling and predictive analytics using clinical texts, and text analysis in social media for healthcare quality assessment, trends towards online interventions based on rapid analysis of health-related posts, and consumer health question answering, among other issues.

Conclusions: Our analysis shows that although clinical NLP continues to advance towards practical applications and more NLP methods are used in large-scale live health information applications, more needs to be done to make NLP use in clinical applications a routine widespread reality. Progress in clinical NLP is mirrored by developments in social media text analysis: the research is moving from capturing trends to addressing individual health-related posts, thus showing potential to become a tool for precision medicine and a valuable addition to the standard healthcare quality evaluation tools.


 


* Both authors contributed equally



Correspondence to:

Dina Demner-Fushman
National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health
Bldg. 38A, Room 10S-1022
8600 Rockville Pike MSC-3824
Bethesda, MD 20894, USA
Phone: +1 301 435 5320   
Fax: +1 301 402 0341