• Invited talk - Dr. Masoud Rouhizadeh
• Project update

Title: Natural Language Processing for Clinical Excellence: The State of Practices, Opportunities, and Challenges: Social and Behavioral Determinants of Health (SBDH) are powerful drivers of future well-being of individuals, but the clinical community rarely has access to standardized tools to systematically incorporate SBDH into clinical research and decision-making. To address this, we have been creating fundamental resources to systematically identify SBDH from within health records. We incorporate a wide range data sources such as coded clinical data (ICD codes), encoded questionnaires, and annotated texts corpora, and we apply a variety of NLP and AI methods such as heuristic-based natural language inference, conventional machine learning, and contextual neural network models. At the same time, we also focus on the dissemination of our methods and collaborating with external partners to ensure the generalizability of our models across various health systems. Results for heuristic-based, deep learning and ensemble models are promising and we have successfully validated our models on external partners sites.

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).