Leverages Natural Language Processing Technology in Healthcare Organizations -
TOKYO, July 12, 2011 -- As a result of joint study, Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd., the University of Tokyo Hospital and the University of Tokyo's Center for Knowledge Structuring have developed a technology to extract data related to side effects from electronic medical charts. Cooperating with other hospitals, the three parties will conduct test demonstrations of a system using this technology to verify its effectiveness.
Using natural language processing, the new technology extracts information on administered drugs and their side effects from discharge summaries - data that summarizes treatment details and progress from the time that patients enter a hospital until they leave, and is recorded on electronic medical charts.
Fuji Xerox will exhibit this technology as reference at the International Modern Hospital Show 2011 held at Tokyo Big Sight from July 13 to 15.
[Challenges in the healthcare field]
With the advances in digitization of medical records such as the widespread use of electronic medical charts, there is a growing need for effective use of accumulated data for clinical research or for medical treatment support. Even with digitized medical records, it is difficult to extract necessary information from them for diagnosis support or statistical processing, because symptoms, test results and medical comments by doctors are normally written without any rules. Therefore, there is a need for the necessary information to be efficiently extracted depending on purposes; particularly the information on potential side effects triggered by drug administration.
[Outcome of the joint study]
In order to accelerate information sharing in business by leveraging documents, Fuji Xerox has been working on research and development of natural language processing, which enables to extract useful information from large volumes of text data, as well as efficiently summarize and analyze the extracted data. Judging its accumulated technology is applicable for medical purposes, the company has been conducting the joint research with the University of Tokyo Hospital since 2007, followed by co-development of the new technology. Based on the outcome, they are currently working on developing a system that automatically creates a tally sheet for each medicine and side effect symptom.
This system enables the automatic extracting, organizing and tallying of necessary information, thus users would be able to track circumstances concerning the occurrence of symptoms from potential side effects in a timely manner. In addition, hospital officials such as doctors, pharmacists and medical professionals involved in pharmaceutical research would be easily able to utilize the organized side effect data for their own purposes. The system would also help raise the safety of doctors' prescriptions and ensure efficient post-sales research on pharmaceutical products.
By test-demonstrating the system incorporating the new technology also at other hospitals, Fuji Xerox aims to consider more valuable uses of the system, conduct test demonstrations for diverse applications, and ultimately commercialize the system as a value-added feature of the Integrated Medical Record Management Solution that the company currently offers to hospitals. With its document technology, Fuji Xerox promotes the utilization of medical data at clinical front and research centers, contributing to improvement of the quality in the healthcare field.
For more information, please visit http://www.fujixerox.co.jp/eng...0712_healthcare.html
(press release)
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