• Invited talk - Dr. Yanshan Wang
• Project update

Title: Natural Language Processing for Clinical Excellence: The State of Practices, Opportunities, and Challenges: Rapid growth in adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has led to an unprecedented expansion in the availability of large longitudinal datasets. Large initiatives such as the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Network (PCORNet), and the Observational Health Data Science and Informatics (OHDSI) consortium, have been established and have reported successful applications of secondary use of EHRs in clinical research and practice. In these applications, natural language processing (NLP) technologies have played a crucial role as much of detailed patient information in EHRs is embedded in narrative clinical documents. Meanwhile, a number of clinical NLP systems, such as MedLEE, MetaMap/MetaMap Lite, cTAKES, MedTagger, and i2b2 have been developed and utilized to extract useful information from diverse types of clinical text, such as clinical notes, radiology reports, and pathology reports. This talk will walk through some successful applications of NLP techniques in the clinical domain with potential opportunities and challenges.

Presenter: Dr. Yanshan Wang
Yanshan Wang, PhD, FAMIA is vice chair of Research and assistant professor within the Department of Health Information Management at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests focus on artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP) and machine/deep learning methodologies and applications in health care. His research goal is to leverage different dimensions of data and data-driven computational approaches to meet the needs of clinicians, researchers, patients and customers. Prior to joining Pitt, Dr. Wang was assistant professor in the Department of AI & Informatics at Mayo Clinic. Yanshan has extensive collaborative research experience with physicians, epidemiology researchers, statisticians, NLP researchers, and IT technicians. He has served as investigators for multiple extramural NIH-funded projects and intramural operational projects. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles in high-impact medical informatics journals (e.g., JBI, JAMIA), and conferences (e.g., AMIA Annual Symposium, AMIA summit, IEEE BIBM). Dr. Wang is also active in organizing conference workshops and shared tasks in the medical informatics community, including the international Health NLP workshops and the national NLP clinical challenge (n2c2).

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