Description of a Rule-based System for the i2b2 Challenge in Natural Language Processing for Clinical Data

Lois C. Childs*, Robert Enelow, Lone Simonsen, Norris H. Heintzelman, Kimberly M. Kowalski, Robert J Taylor

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Abstract

The Obesity Challenge, sponsored by Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2), a National Center for Biomedical Computing, asked participants to build software systems that could "read" a patient's clinical discharge summary and replicate the judgments of physicians in evaluating presence or absence of obesity and 15 comorbidities. The authors describe their methodology and discuss the results of applying Lockheed Martin's rule-based natural language processing (NLP) capability, ClinREAD. We tailored ClinREAD with medical domain expertise to create assigned default judgments based on the most probable results as defined in the ground truth. It then used rules to collect evidence similar to the evidence that the human judges likely relied upon, and applied a logic module to weigh the strength of all evidence collected to arrive at final judgments. The Challenge results suggest that rule-based systems guided by human medical expertise are capable of solving complex problems in machine processing of medical text.
Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of the American Medical Informatics Association
Volume16
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)571-575
ISSN1067-5027
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2009
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

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