Natural Language Processing Workbench Web Services

In the United States, central cancer registries collect cancer data from sources such as hospitals, laboratories, physician’s offices, and independent diagnostic and treatment centers. While Meaningful Use and other activities have increased the use of standardized electronic health record (EHR) systems, some parts of the medical records, laboratory reports, and other clinical reports are still free-form, unstructured (narrative) text.

Computers cannot process narrative text automatically; human intervention is required to extract the critical pieces of information needed to complete a cancer case report. Similarly, trained abstractors must retrieve and code the appropriate elements from the clinical narrative text submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) spontaneous reporting systems for drugs, vaccines, and blood products.

The process of abstracting these data manually is labor-intensive and expensive. In addition, a diminishing workforce and an increased demand for timely and accurate data that are stored in narrative text create challenges. The unstructured narrative text in pathology, post-market, biomarker, and EHR reports contain data researchers need to study overall population health and quality of patient care.

The use of natural language processing (NLP) will increase the completeness, timeliness, and accuracy of data while reducing the level of human intervention needed to identify critical data in narrative text.

The Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation’s Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) Trust Fund funded FDA and CDC for two years to develop an NLP Workbench on a shared Web service platform for PCOR researchers, as well as public health agencies at all levels. The NLP Workbench will provide free access to NLP and machine learning tools to develop and share language models and other algorithms that convert unstructured clinical text to coded data. The NLP Workbench will consist of open-source architectures and tools that any public health agency can use to develop NLP services, and will be hosted initially on CDC’s Innovation Research and Development lab.

Learn about the NLP Workbench Web Services architectural design, cancer domain pilot project, and safety surveillance domain pilot project.