We are seeing a rise of Artificial Intelligence in medicine. This has potential for remarkable improvements in diagnosis, prevention and treatment in healthcare. Many of the existing applications are about rapid image interpretation using AI. We have many open opportunities in leveraging NLP for improving both clinical workflows and patient outcomes.
Python has become the language of choice for Natural Language Processing (NLP) in both research and development: from old school NLTK to PyTorch for building state-of-the-art deep learning models. Libraries such as Gensim and spaCy have also enabled production-ready NLP applications. More recently, Hugging Face has built a business around rapidly making current NLP research quickly accessible.
Yesterday, I presented on processing clinical text using Python at the local Python User Group meeting.
During the talk I discussed some opportunities in clinical NLP, mapped out fundamental NLP tasks, and toured the available programming resources– Python libraries and frameworks. Many of these libraries make it extremely easy to leverage state-of-the-art NLP research for building models on clinical text. Towards end of the talk, I also shared some data resources to explore and start hacking on.
It was a fun experience overall and I received some thoughtful comments and feedback — both during the talk and later also online. Special thanks to Pete Fein for organizing the meetup. It was probably the first time I had so many people put on a waitlist for attending one of my presentations. I am also sharing my slides from the talk in hope that they can be useful…