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Introduction to Natural Language Processing of Clinical Text

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Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine

Part of the book series: Cognitive Informatics in Biomedicine and Healthcare ((CIBH))

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Abstract

Clinical and biomedical natural language processing (NLP) has a wide range of practical applications in clinical and biomedical research, quality assurance of clinical care and delivery of information to patients. Research in Clinical NLP is constantly growing. This book serves as an introduction to the areas of foundational and applied biomedical language processing, with particular focus on clinical language processing. At the time of this writing, Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrated remarkable performance in some complex language processing and language generation tasks, including tasks that involve clinical language. These advances revealed the unprecedented opportunities for language processing and the unforeseen pitfalls and complications of using LLMs. All these developments emphasize the need for knowledge of the traditional linguistically motivated and domain-knowledge grounded approaches presented in this book along with the latest developments in machine learning and LLMs.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Library of Medicine, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Dina Demner Fushman

  2. Yale University, 100 College St, New Haven, CT, 06510, USA

    Hua Xu

Authors
  1. Dina Demner Fushman
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  2. Hua Xu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dina Demner Fushman .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Hua Xu

  2. United States National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Dina Demner Fushman

Glossary

Large Language Model (LLM)

A class of deep learning architectures based on transformer models trained on extensive amounts of text. A transformer model is a neural network that learns context and meaning by tracking relationships in sequential data.

The Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC)

a large, freely-available database comprising deidentified health-related data associated with over forty thousand patients who stayed in critical care units of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center between 2001 and 2012.

Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)

An agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services that is charged with supporting the adoption of health information technology and promoting nationwide health information exchange to improve health care.

Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)

A terminology system, developed under the direction of the National Library of Medicine, to produce a common structure that ties together the various vocabularies that have been created for biomedical domains.

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Demner Fushman, D., Xu, H. (2024). Introduction to Natural Language Processing of Clinical Text. In: Xu, H., Demner Fushman, D. (eds) Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine. Cognitive Informatics in Biomedicine and Healthcare. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55865-8_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55865-8_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-55864-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-55865-8

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