In this presentation, Karin Verspoor introduces ideas presented in a recent JAMIA Perspective paper, grounding them in some recent examples of information extraction systems developed with clinical partners.
The paper contrasts NLP (or more generally, AI) systems that target what are called “high hanging fruit” tasks, that place full decision-making or diagnostic control into the hands of the system, with tasks that are more explicitly about supporting clinicians to make decisions, e.g. by surfacing the most relevant information to specific decisions. The paper argues that a shift towards clinical NLP (cNLP) systems that address “tasks as needs” rather than “tasks as decisions” will enable more translation of cNLP into practical use.
Read the full article in JAMIA
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Presenter
Karin Verspoor
Professor Karin Verspoor is Executive Dean of the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She is a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health, a 2021 “Brilliant Woman in Digital Health”, and was selected as a finalist in the Women in AI Australia/New Zealand Awards 2022 for “AI in Innovation”.
Karin is passionate about using artificial intelligence to enable biological discovery and clinical decision support from data. Her work has a specific emphasis on the use of natural language processing to transform unstructured data in biomedicine into actionable information.
Karin held previous posts as Director of Health Technologies and Deputy Head of the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, as the Scientific Director of Health and Life Sciences at NICTA Victoria Research Laboratory, at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She also spent 5 years in tech start-ups during the US Tech bubble, where she helped design an early artificial intelligence system.
Karin received a BA with a double major in Computer Science and Cognitive Sciences from Rice University in Houston, TX, USA, and completed both a MSc and PhD in Cognitive Science and Natural Language at the University of Edinburgh, UK.