Open course ware

PETER SZOLOVITS: Fortunately, I have a guest today, Dr. Adam Wright, who will be doing an interview-style session and will answer questions for you. This is Adam's bread and butter, exactly how to translate this kind of technology into the clinic. He's currently in the partner system at the Brigham, I guess. But he's about to become a traitor and leave us in Boston and occupy a position at Vanderbilt University, for which we wish him luck. But I'm glad that we caught him before he leaves this summer. OK, so quite frankly, I wish that I could tell you a much happier story than the one that you're going to hear from me during the prepared part of my talk. And maybe Adam will cheer us up and make us more optimistic, based on his experience. So you may have noticed that AI is hot. So HIMSS, for example, is the Health Information Management Systems Society. It's a big-- they hold annual meetings and consist of a lot of vendors and a lot of academics. An...

PETER SZOLOVITS: All right. Let's get started. Good afternoon. So last time, I started talking about the use of natural language processing to process clinical data. And things went a little bit slowly. And so we didn't get through a lot of the material. I'm going to try to rush a bit more today. And as a result, I have a lot of stuff to cover. So if you remember, last time, I started by saying that a lot of the NLP work involves coming up with phrases that one might be interested in to help identify the kinds of data that you want, and then just looking for those in text. So that's a very simple method. But it's one that works reasonably well. And then Kat Liao was here to talk about some of the applications of that kind of work in what she's been doing in cohort selection. So what I want to talk about today is more sophisticated versions of that, and then move on to more contemporary approaches to natural language processing. So this is a paper t...