Motivation

Clinical procedures are a set of actions, interventions, or treatments that are carried out by healthcare professionals to diagnose, treat, or manage a patient’s medical condition. They can include physical examinations, laboratory tests, imaging studies, surgical procedures, medication administration, and other forms of medical intervention.

Clinical procedures are essential to patient care as they help healthcare providers diagnose and treat medical conditions, monitor disease progression, and prevent complications. They also play a critical role in advancing medical knowledge and improving healthcare outcomes through research. The advancement of diagnostic and treatment methods are cornerstones of state-of-the-art medical practice. New treatments such as CAR T-cell therapy are being tested for diverse types of cancers, and point-of-care diagnostics are expanding and even used at home. Some diseases, like infection by the HIV, are comparatively easy to diagnose, while others, like bile duct cancer, require more time and resources.

MedProcNER aims to provide the basis of AI systems that capture any medical procedure in unstructured medical texts to facilitate: quality control in health services, use of resources, incorporation of new techniques and methods, role of biomaterials, iatrogenic effects of procedures, etc. Mentions of procedures in clinical texts are not only relevant but also very complex at times, as they are really varied, sometimes ambiguous and can be quite long (e.g. descriptions of surgery procedures). Systems that are able to detect, normalize and index clinical procedures in unstructured text are valuable assets that have the potential to improve the quality of healthcare data, increase efficiency in clinical workflows, and ultimately lead to better patient outcomes.

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