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Global Center of Excellence Symposium Poster Session at Hokkaido University

Health Informatics

The Global Center of Excellence Symposium poster session at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, was held October the 5th 2011. All researches from Hokkaido University that are part of this center showed their work.

The language media laboratory, that I am visiting, is a part of this center and had posters on various subjects. For instance computer assisted language learning, emotion recognition and, what is related to my research area,  natural language processing of informal language.

Michal Mazur is a PhD student at the language media laboratory. The poster is by him, Dr. Rafal Rzepka and Prof. Kenji Araki. The poster to the left is about NLP of informal language, by Eleanor Clark, also PhD student at the language media laboratory.

Dr. Jonas Sjöberg did of course have the best title of his poster: “Where are my socks?” – Real Life Search Using Wireless Technologies. It was about building a system that allows searching for objects through wireless technologies, both searching for smart objects that can reply themselves and other objects that can be tagged with, for instance, RFID tags.

 

 

 

AIME conference in Bled

Health Informatics, SYSLAB

Our research group, IT for Health, was very well represented at the AIME conference (Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 2-6 July, 2011). This year the conference was located at the idyllic village Bled in Slovenia.

At the main conference, Aron Henriksson presented his, Martin Hassel’s and Mia Kvist’s paper: “Diagnosis Code Assignment Support Using Random Indexing of Patient Records – A Qualitative Feasibility Study”.

At the third Louhi workshop at the conference, organized by the Norwegian group in the HEXAnord network, our research group had three presentations. Aron presented another paper by him and Martin, “Election of Diagnosis Codes: Words as Responsible Citizens”. Hideyuki Tanushi presented the paper “Calculating Prevalence of Comorbidity and Comorbidity Combinations with Diabetes in Hospital Care in Sweden Using a Health Care Record Database” that was the result of his master thesis, and that was written by Hideyuki together with Hercules Dalianis and Gunnar Nilsson. Finally, I presented a paper, “Retrieving disorders and findings: Results using SNOMED CT and NegEx adapted for Swedish”, also written together with Hercules and Gunnar.

Welcome reception at the old castle

Welcome reception at the old castle

Aron presenting at the main conference

Aron presenting at the main conference

Louhi workshop participants

Louhi workshop participants

 

 

Seminar on “Designing the secondary user experience”

Health Informatics, SYSLAB

On 2 March Ole Andreas Alsos gave a seminar with the title “Designing the secondary user experience”.

The seminar was both about the secondary user experience in general and about a study on mobile electronic patient record systems, used by physicians in front of patients in a hospital. In that situation, the physician is the primary user and the patient the secondary, and properties of the user interface intended for the primary user can affect both the user experience of the primary and the secondary user.

Ole Andreas Alsos is a last year PhD student at the Department of Computer and Information Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology whom we met when he gave a very interesting presentation for us when we visited him in Trondheim with the HEXAnord network.

The seminar slides:

Secondary-UX-Ole-Andreas-Alsos

 

The fourth HEXAnord meeting, Trondheim January 10-12, 2011

Health Informatics, Photo, SYSLAB
The fourth HEXAnord meeting took place in Trondheim in January 10-12, 2011, with participants from Lithuania, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. The three-day meeting included lectures and discussions on annotation, machine learning, medical terminology, natural language processing and other topics related to analysis of clinical text. The HEXAnord group also made a study visit to St. Olavs hospital, visiting two different clinics, Cardiology and Intensive Care Unit as well as the usability lab at The Norwegian EHR Research Centre, NSEP, (Norsk senter for elektroniskpasientjournal). New groups were also formed, aiming at continuing last year’s collaborative research across research groups in different countries.
There was also time for social activities, and the bravest Swedes joined the semi-professional cross-country skiers from Finland and Norway. After dawn, we were all served coffee in the traditional Norwegian way, that is outside, under the stars.

(Participants from DSV were Helen Allvin, Hercules Dalianis, Martin Hassel, Aron Henriksson, Maria Skeppstedt and Sumithra Velupillai.)

Trondheim

Hercules opening the meeting

Annotation

HEXAnord PhD course

St. Olavs hospital

Norwegian coffee

Usability lab

Usability lab

Two of the brave

Skiers

Nordic skiing collaboration

All participants, except Hercules, who is behind the camera

AMIA symposium

Health Informatics, Information Systems, SYSLAB
In November (13-17), I was in Washington at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium, which is one of the largest conferences in medical informatics. The talks and posters presented at the conference covered many aspects of medical informatics and there was always at least one NLP (natural language processing) or data mining track.
Many talks and posters were relevant for the areas that we in the human language technology group within IT for Health are working on, such as the area automatic classification and coding and the area uncertainty and negation detection.
I was lucky enough to receive a scholarship for going to the conference, which I am really grateful for, since I learnt a lot!

Paper accepted to the 2nd Louhi Workshop on Text and Data Mining of Health Documents

Health Informatics, Publication, Research Paper, SYSLAB

My paper “Negation Detection in Swedish Clinical Text” has been accepted after a double blind peer-review to the 2nd Louhi Workshop on Text and Data Mining of Health Documents in L.A., June 5 2010. Later, the paper will be on my dsv-home page. A list of used Swedish negation trigger phrases can be found there already, if anyone would need to search for negations.

A part of the abstract:

NegEx, a rule-based algorithm that detects negations in English clinical text, was translated into Swedish and evaluated on clinical text written in Swedish. The NegEx algorithm detects negations through the use of trigger phrases, which indicate that a preceding or following concept is negated. A list of English trigger phrases was translated into Swedish, taking grammatical differences between the two languages into account. This translation was evaluated on sentences from Swedish health records.

Report from the HEXAnord network meeting in Vilnius

SYSLAB, Visit

The 13th of January, the IT for Health group at DSV went for a three day HEXAnord network meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania. Apart from Hercules Dalianis, Martin Hassel, Sumithra Velupillai, Elin Carlsson, Helen Allvin and me from DSV, there were participants with a background in medical informatics, language technology and nursing science from Finland, Norway, Denmark, Estonia and Lithuania. The meeting consisted of seminars on SNOMED CT and on Machine Learning and Clinical Text and of an excursion to the nearby castle Trakai. Most importantly, the work of comparing Swedish and Finnish health records was initialized.

The organizers of the meeting were Hercules, who was in charge of agenda, and Helen, who took care of everything else in a fantastic way. The participants seemed to be very pleased with the very well-organized
meeting, and it was decided to meet again in Åre this spring and in the Stockholm Archipelago in the autumn.

Maria Skeppstedt, new PhD student

Employee, SYSLAB

Hi!

I have started as a PhD student at Syslab, where I will work with text mining in health records. My supervisor will be Hercules Dalianis, and my co-supervisor will be Gunnar Nilsson.

Up till now I have worked at my father’s company, Popab, which specialises in canes, crutches and their accessories, and before that I worked as a programmer for five years at Försäkringskassan (the Swedish Social Insurance Agency).

I have studied computer science at KTH and some linguistics at the Stockholm University.