Clinical text retrieval by Professor Hercules Dalianis, Stockholm University

Hello everyone,

We are glad to announce our next meetup on the 17th of February, 2016 where Professor Hercules Dalianis from Stockholm University will be presenting a talk on clinical text retrieval.

This is a very exciting research area and we welcome you all to join this meetup to make it a successful event.

There will be a video recording and we will share the link later.

Schedule:

17:30  - 18:00: Mingling

18:00  - 19:00:  Presentation + Q&A.

19:00 - 19:30: Discussion and mingling

Title:

"Clinical text retrieval - some challenges, methods and applications using Swedish patient records to improve healthcare." By Professor Hercules Dalianis, Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University

Abstract:

Healthcare has many challenges in form of monitoring and predicting adverse events as healthcare associated infections or adverse drug events. When and how many have occurred, how can one predict them? We have access to a large repository of electronic patient records in Swedish from Karolinska University Hospital that contain a vast source of information, both in form of structured information as diagnosis codes, drug codes, laboratory values, time stamps etc. and unstructured information in form of free text. Domain experts i.e. physicians have assisted us to manually annotate the textual entities in the clinical text. The annotated clinical texts have then been pre processed using different computational linguistic methods including distributional semantic methods. Machine learning tools have then been applied on the annotated text to train models that have been evaluated. Our methods show that it is feasible to construct tools that clinical researchers and hospital management can use to improve healthcare.

About Professor Hercules Dalianis:

Dalianis is a professor in Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. Dalianis graduated in 1984 at KTH in Electrotechnical Engineering, (Civilingenjör), and received his PhD (Teknologie doctor) at KTH 1996. Dalianis was post doc researcher at University of Southern California/ISI in Los Angeles 1997-98. Dalianis was also post doc researcher (forskarassistent) at NADA KTH 1999-2003, moreover Dalianis held a three year guest professorship at CST, University of Copenhagen during 2002-2005, founded by Norfa, the Nordic council. Dalianis founded Euroling AB in year 2000. Euroling AB develops and delivers the web and intranet search engine SiteSeeker to over 350 customers, mostly Swedish governmental organisations. Dalianis works in the interface between industry and university and with the aim to make research results useful for society. Dalianis has specialized in the area of human language technology, to make computer to understand and process human language text, but also to make a computer to produce text automatically. Currently Dalianis is working in the area of clinical text mining with the aim to improve healthcare in form of better electronic patient record systems, presentation of the patient records and extraction of valuable information both for clinical researchers but also for lay persons as for example patients.