Natural language processing (NLP) is about analyzing and synthesizing texts for understanding the message expressed in written and spoken human languages. NLP is used in many technological applications, such as virtual personal assistants, machine translation, document summarization and named entity recognition.
Recently, medical applications have been enriched with insights generated by data-driven algorithms based on some of the recent artificial intelligence developments. These insights were proven to be extremely valuable for making clinical decisions when treating real patients. Some of the insights are generated from unstructured data, such as imaging (e.g., CT, X-Ray), and free running texts (e.g., doctor notes, speech samples). There is an increasing interest in using NLP algorithms in healthcare. It seems like medical institutes are more open to share unstructured data in order to encode some important aspects of a medical condition of a patient, which are not typically expressed in the traditional electronic medical records.
In this talk I will cover some of our recent activities in applying NLP for medical applications. Among other projects I will present our work in mental health, in collaboration with the Beer Yaacov Mental Health Center, in which we process transcribed speech in order to detect symptoms for schizophrenia. I will also talk about our ongoing work with the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov) in which we extract patient clinical timeline from doctor notes, for now focusing on oncology. I will show some preliminary results and present some of our current and future research directions.
Kfir Bar is the chief scientist and head of research at Basis Technology, a company that specializes in building software for natural language processing (NLP). Kfir is a lecturer in a number of computer science schools, including IDC, Bar Ilan and Tel Aviv University. Kfir is also a part-time faculty member at the computer science school at the College of Management. He teaches courses in machine and deep learning as well as natural language processing. Kfir holds a PhD in computer science from Tel Aviv University for a thesis on Semantics and Machine Translation.