NLP in Healthcare

Healthcare has achieved significant progress in recent years. As an essential technology

powered by AI, natural language processing (NLP) plays a key role in smart healthcare due to
its capability of analyzing and understanding human language.

Fig: Basic architecture of NLP-driven applications

MODELLING EXAMPLES:
1. Information Extraction
Diseases, drugs, and events are extracted (mainly temporal expressions, spatial
expressions, and participant information) through name entity recognition relation
extraction and event extraction from medical text, including unstructured text in
Electronic Health Records (EHRs), articles, etc.
2. Machine translation
Growing attention to building better (multilingual) translation systems and further
leveraging multilingual healthcare resources for other applications to provide more
accurate translations or require less time than human translations.
3. Knowledge engineering
 Knowledge acquisition and knowledge representation are coupled with information
extraction, aiming at the acquisition and representation of medical knowledge in a
certain way
4. Causal inference
A discipline concerning the determination of the actual effects of specific things,
events, or phenomena.
5. Speech recognition and speech synthesis
Studies attempt to build automatic computer systems for interconversion between
speech and text in the area of smart healthcare, making human-machine interaction
as natural and flexible as human-human interaction

Fig: Major Players in the Healthcare Ecosystem

APPLICATIONS OF NLP FOR SMART HEALTHCARE

A. Clinical Practice
1) Clinical Communication and Data Collection:
 Clinical data, including demographics, medical history, notes, examination
records, electronic recordings, laboratory results, and medical images, are
crucial for diagnosis, treatment, and analysis.
 Patient-provider communication is vital for gathering firsthand clinical data.
 Machine translation can aid in communication with patients of different
languages or low literacy and health education levels.
 Speech recognition enables the creation of free text notes, reducing medical
staff's time spent on labor-intensive clinical documentation.
B. Hospital Management
1) Medical Resource
 Due to limited medical resources, efficient allocation is crucial.
 Patient triage systems prioritize critical cases, enhancing resource allocation
effectiveness.
 Virtual assistants, hospital automation systems, and collaborative robots with
voice control alleviate the burden on medical staff, improving hospital
management efficiency.
 Predictive models for patient readmission aid in rearranging resources and
reducing readmission rates.
 Text generation techniques can automate routine report writing, freeing
medical staff for direct patient care.

2) Data Management
 Text classification, information extraction, and text summarization manage
large volumes of medical documentation.
 These methods generate category labels, informative keywords, and
simplified summaries for efficient management.
 Information retrieval systems, including those based on semantic search and
question answering, facilitate retrieval in healthcare information systems.

3) Service Quality Control

 Sentiment analysis using patient experience feedback aids hospitals in
enhancing service quality and patient experience.
 Historically, this analysis required significant personnel resources, but NLP
simplifies the process and boosts efficiency.
 NLP can significantly improve the efficiency of sentiment analysis, making it
easier to analyze patient feedback.

C. Personal Care
1) Assisting Elderly Individuals and Disabled Individuals
 NLP techniques improve the quality of life and social integration for elderly
and disabled individuals.
 Voice-controlled home automation systems and robots assist them in daily
tasks.
 Robots, especially those communicating, can encourage social interactions
and companionship.
D. Public Health
1) Health Knowledge Popularization and Medical Education
 Health knowledge popularization and medical education are crucial public
health interventions to enhance health literacy and promote healthy habits.
 Knowledge engineering enables the establishment of accurate medical
knowledge bases for widespread dissemination.
 Question answering systems, information retrieval systems, and machine
translation systems facilitate easy access to medical knowledge.
 Text generation techniques, including question generation and text
summarization, aid in medical education by generating case-based questions
and simplified summaries.
E. Drug Development
1) Drug Discovery
 NLP assists in constructing textual representations of biochemical entities to
map interactions between diseases, drugs/chemical compounds, and
biomacromolecules (e.g., genes, proteins).
 It aids in predicting molecular properties and designing novel molecules.

2) Preclinical Research
 NLP techniques, particularly information extraction, identify relations
between chemical structures and biological activity.
 They aid researchers in searching for potentially effective chemical
compounds through virtual screening in a vast chemical space.
 NLP is also used in predicting adverse drug reactions, including side effect
prediction and toxicity prediction, in preclinical research.
LIMITATIONS AND OUTLOOK
A. Understanding Human Language

 Despite significant efforts to enhance natural language understanding, the flexibility

of human language poses challenges, particularly when encountering ambiguity in
biomedical texts.
 Misunderstanding could result in inaccurate actions by robots, irrelevant information
from search engines, and incorrect decisions by decision support systems.
 Such errors can lead to economic losses, wasted time, and potentially serious
consequences.
B. Interpretability

 Learned features are often not understandable by humans.

 Tuning pre-trained language models lacks intuition on data and application types,
hindering performance guarantee.
 Efforts to achieve interpretable NLP-driven applications in healthcare are ongoing but
still lack convincing methodologies.
 Until interpretability issues are fully addressed, decision support systems in clinical
practice remain auxiliary and pose ethical and practical concerns.
C. Implementation
 The development of neural NLP has led to the adoption of large deep neural
networks, resulting in increased computing power and training costs.
 Concerns about the reliability of neural NLP systems persist.
 Patient privacy concerns hinder the effectiveness of these models in smart
healthcare.
 Medical ethics considerations complicate practical implementation.
 Beyond addressing these limitations, there are other directions to enhance existing
NLP systems for smart healthcare.