Compositional Information Extraction Methodology from Medical Reports

Currently health care industry is undergoing a huge expansion in different aspects. Advances in Clinical Informatics (CI) are an important part of this expansion process. One of the goals of CI is to apply Information Technology for better patient care service provision through two major applications namely electronic health care data management and information extraction from medical documents. In this paper we focus on the second application. For better management and fruitful use of information, it is necessary to contextually segregate important/relevant information buried in a huge corpus of unstructured texts. Hence Information Extraction (IE) from unstructured texts becomes a key technology in CI that deals with different sub-topics like extraction of biomedical entity and relations, passage/paragraph level information extraction, ontological study of diseases and treatments, summarization and topic identification etc. Though literature is promising for different IE tasks for individual topics, availability of an integrated approach for contextually relevant IE from medical documents is not apparent enough. To this end, we propose a compositional approach using integration of contextually (domain specific) constructed IE modules to improve knowledge support for patient care activity. The input to this composite system is free format medical case reports containing stage wise information corresponding to the evolution path of a patient care activity. The output is a compilation of various types of extracted information organized under different tags like past medical history, sign/symptoms, test and test results, diseases, treatment and follow up. The outcome is aimed to help the health care professionals in exploring a large corpus of medical case-studies and selecting only relevant component level information according to need/interest.