Fiscal Year:
2008
Title:
Extracting Semantic Knowledge from Clinical Reports
Agency:
HHS
Contract:
9R44RR024929-02
Award Amount:
$852,683.00
Abstract:
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Analyzing and processing free-text medical reports for data mining and clinical data interchange is one of the most challenging problems in medical informatics, yet it is crucial for continued research advances and impr
ovements in clinical care. Natural language processing (NLP) is an important enabling technology, but has been held back because it is difficult to understand human language, since it requires extensive domain knowledge. In Phase I, we developed new statis
tical and machine learning methods that apply domain specific knowledge to the semantic analysis of free-text radiology reports. The methods enabled the creation of two new prototype applications - a SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine--Clinic
al Terms) coding service called SnomedCoder, and a text mining tool for analyzing a large corpus of medical reports, called DataMiner. In Phase II, we will accomplish the following specific aims: 1) Improve the semantic extraction methods developed in Phas
e I, 2) Expand the semantic knowledge base and classify at least two million new unique sentences from multiple medical institutions, 3) Provide a SNOMED CT auto coding service (alpha service) to participating Indiana Health Information Exchange hospitals,
and 4) Build a commercial version of the DataMiner software, and test its functionality using researchers at the Regenstrief Institute. These scientific innovations will revolutionize the ability of health care researchers to analyze vast reposito
ries of clinical information currently locked up in electronic medical records, and correlate this data with new biomedical discoveries in proteonomics and genomics. The ability to codify text rapidly will extend the potential for clinical decision support
beyond its narrow base of numeric and structured medical data, and enable SNOMED CT to become a useful coding standard. Phase III will offer coding and data mining services to healthcare payers (both private and government), pharmaceuticals, and academic
researchers. A key advantage of our approach over other NLP systems is that we attempt to codify all the information in the report and not just a limited subset, and insist on expert validation which provides a high degree of confidence in the accuracy of
the coded data.Project Narrative
Small Business Information at Submission:
LOGICAL SEMANTICS, INC.
LOGICAL SEMANTICS, INC. 351 West 10th St, STE 347 INDIANAPOLIS, IN 46202
EIN/Tax ID:
352106406
DUNS:
N/A
Number of Employees:
N/A
Woman-Owned:
No
Minority-Owned:
No
HUBZone-Owned:
No