DASH

News and Events

Louhi 2010, Second Louhi Workshop on Text and Data Mining of Health Documents at NAACL HLT 2010, Los Angeles, June 5, 2010

Health Informatics, SYSLAB

Hercules Dalianis, Martin Hassel and Sumithra Velupillai organized the Louhi 2010, Second Louhi Workshop on Text and Data Mining of Health Documuntes. Maria Skeppstedt also from our group presented her paper Negation Detection in Swedish Clinical Text. We presented also a joint paper with the HEXAnord research network. Eduard Hovy from USC/ISI held an excellent invited talk with the title Creating Training Material for Health Informatics: Toward a Science of Annotation for over 30 attendants.


The Louhi 2010 workshop was a success with submissions from eleven countries and three continents. The presentations encompassed clinical texts in Swedish, Finnish, French and English. The main conference NAACL-HLT, the 11th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, had over 600 participants and 200 accepted papers.

Report from the LREC conference in Malta the 19th to 21st of May

Health Informatics, Information Systems, Photo, Research Paper, SYSLAB, Visit

Hercules Dalianis, Sumithra Velupillai and me (Elin Carlsson) participated in the the seventh international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) that was held in Valletta, Malta 19-21 May 2010. The conference had approximately 1200 participants and about 600 out of 900 submissions were accepted.

We presented three different posters: Creating a Reusable English-Chinese Parallel Corpus for Bilingual Dictionary Construction; How Certain are Clinical Assessments? Annotating Swedish Clinical Text for (Un)certainties, Speculations and Negations; and Influence of Module Order on Rule-Based De-identification of Personal Names in Electronic Patient Records Written in Swedish. I attach our report from the conference (written in Swedish): LREC2010_notes_and_reflections.pdf

Sumithra and Hercules present their poster: How Certain are Clinical Assessments? Annotating Swedish Clinical Text for (Un)certainties, Speculations and Negations

Elin and Hercules present their poster: Influence of Module Order on Rule-Based De-identification of Personal Names in Electronic Patient Records
Written in Swedish.

 

Hercules and Elin after the poster session.

Master Programme in Health Informatics with Karolinska Institute

Health Informatics, SYSLAB

New joint Master programme in Health Informatics with Karolinska Institute is starting this fall 2010. Last application day is April 15.

The master programme is at Lime/Karolinska Institute but is carried out jointly with DSV/Stockholm University. The students will be a mix of students with clinical background and studies and students with a technical background. We believe that since Health Informatics is such a complex research area it is essential to work jointly with people having experience in both clinical and technical areas.

Proposal for automatically detecting adverse events “AutoGTT” submitted to Vinnova

Health Informatics, SYSLAB

The research group within “IT for Health” has submitted a three year research proposal to Vinnova

for automatically detecting adverse events with the title AutoGTT – An automatic trigger tool from patient record to better patient security.
According to the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) over 8.6 percent of all patients in Sweden are affected by adverse events, sometimes also with a fatal outcome. To monitor adverse events today one takes samples from patient records and decides whether a patient had an
adverse event or not. Our research proposal envisions a semi automatic method that hopefully is more accurate, faster and with a larger coverage than the manual GTT method. The partners in this project proposal are DSV/Stockholm University, Karolinska University Hospital and SAS Institute AB.
The proposal has already passed the first step in the application process and was invited to submit a full proposal in the second step. The acceptance rate for step one was roughly 20 percent.

A paper on English-Chinese word alignment has been accepted to LREC 2010, Malta, May 17-23.

Information Systems, Research Paper, SYSLAB

A master thesis written by the EMIS master students Hao-chun Xing and Xin Zhang has been converted to a scientific paper together with their supervisor Hercules Dalianis. The paper is accepted to The seventh international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2010) with the title Creating a Reusable English-Chinese Parallel Corpus for Bilingual Dictionary Construction.

Virtual Healthcare Interaction – VHI 09, AAAI 2009 Fall Symposium Series, November 5-7

Health Informatics, Information Systems, SYSLAB

Hercules Dalianis and Sumithra Velupillai participated at the Virtual Healthcare Interaction – VHI 09, AAAI 2009 Fall Symposium Series, November 5-7, Arlington, VA, USA. They hold a panel with the title Is De-identification of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) Possible? – Use of Health Record Corpora for Research. Various issues regarding de-identification, anonymization, pseudonymisation and re-identification were discussed. One important aspect
that was brought up, was the importance of considering the distortion of de-identified textual data, i.e. how much important information is lost in de-identified data? One possible approach that was mentioned was to use a Blackbox approach; not letting the researcher reach the data at all, while still being able to apply information access methods! Panel proposal in PDF.

The Virtual Healthcare Interaction also contained presentations of research on the creation of virtual patients for training physicians and students but also virtual clinicians to help patients to be more aware of their deceases and their treatment, to involve both patients and their relatives in the health care procedure. Summarizing, visualizing and tailoring patient records for different user groups. The VHI had almost 30 participants but the whole Fall symposium contained seven different tracks with over 150 participants.

Five outlines for research proposals to Vinnova’s program “Innovationer för framtidens hälsa”!

Health Informatics, SYSLAB

Five outlines for research proposals were submitted to Vinnova’s program Innovationer för framtidens hälsa, (Innovations for the Future Health), on September 17. One outline involved a five year health innovation environment and the four other outlines involved four three year project proposals. The research areas are patient safety, automatic ICD-10 coding, hypothesis generation and case based patient record retrieval in the areas of research, education and clinical work. Partners are the Karolinska Institute, Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm County Council, Profdoc Care, AB Datawell AB, Healthcare Solutions AB, GE Healthcare Bio-Sciences AB