title: Natural Language Processing Technologies in Radiology Research and Clinical Applications.
abstract: The migration of imaging reports to electronic medical record systems holds great potential in terms of advancing radiology research and practice by leveraging the large volume of data continuously being updated, integrated, and shared. However, there are significant challenges as well, largely due to the heterogeneity of how these data are formatted. Indeed, although there is movement toward structured reporting in radiology (ie, hierarchically itemized reporting with use of standardized terminology), the majority of radiology reports remain unstructured and use free-form language. To effectively "mine" these large datasets for hypothesis testing, a robust strategy for extracting the necessary information is needed. Manual extraction of information is a time-consuming and often unmanageable task. "Intelligent" search engines that instead rely on natural language processing (NLP), a computer-based approach to analyzing free-form text or speech, can be used to automate this data mining task. The overall goal of NLP is to translate natural human language into a structured format (ie, a fixed collection of elements), each with a standardized set of choices for its value, that is easily manipulated by computer programs to (among other things) order into subcategories or query for the presence or absence of a finding. The authors review the fundamentals of NLP and describe various techniques that constitute NLP in radiology, along with some key applications.
authors.affiliation: From the Applied Imaging Science Laboratory, Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 75 Francis St, Boston, MA 02115 (T.C., A.A.G., K.K.K., F.J.R., D.M.); Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Mass (S.Y.); and Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Mass (T.K., B.R.).
authors.forename: Tianrun
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Cai
authors.affiliation: From the Applied Imaging Science Laboratory, Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 75 Francis St, Boston, MA 02115 (T.C., A.A.G., K.K.K., F.J.R., D.M.); Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Mass (S.Y.); and Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Mass (T.K., B.R.).
authors.forename: Andreas A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Giannopoulos
authors.affiliation: From the Applied Imaging Science Laboratory, Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 75 Francis St, Boston, MA 02115 (T.C., A.A.G., K.K.K., F.J.R., D.M.); Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Mass (S.Y.); and Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Mass (T.K., B.R.).
authors.forename: Sheng
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: From the Applied Imaging Science Laboratory, Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 75 Francis St, Boston, MA 02115 (T.C., A.A.G., K.K.K., F.J.R., D.M.); Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Mass (S.Y.); and Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Mass (T.K., B.R.).
authors.forename: Tatiana
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kelil
authors.affiliation: From the Applied Imaging Science Laboratory, Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 75 Francis St, Boston, MA 02115 (T.C., A.A.G., K.K.K., F.J.R., D.M.); Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Mass (S.Y.); and Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Mass (T.K., B.R.).
authors.forename: Beth
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Ripley
authors.affiliation: From the Applied Imaging Science Laboratory, Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 75 Francis St, Boston, MA 02115 (T.C., A.A.G., K.K.K., F.J.R., D.M.); Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Mass (S.Y.); and Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Mass (T.K., B.R.).
authors.forename: Kanako K
authors.initials: KK
authors.lastname: Kumamaru
authors.affiliation: From the Applied Imaging Science Laboratory, Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 75 Francis St, Boston, MA 02115 (T.C., A.A.G., K.K.K., F.J.R., D.M.); Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Mass (S.Y.); and Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Mass (T.K., B.R.).
authors.forename: Frank J
authors.initials: FJ
authors.lastname: Rybicki
authors.affiliation: From the Applied Imaging Science Laboratory, Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 75 Francis St, Boston, MA 02115 (T.C., A.A.G., K.K.K., F.J.R., D.M.); Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Mass (S.Y.); and Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Mass (T.K., B.R.).
authors.forename: Dimitrios
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Mitsouras
mesh_terms: D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000458:organization & administration*; D057225:Data Mining / Q000379:methods*; D057286:Electronic Health Records / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D000069550:Machine Learning; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods; D011871:Radiology / Q000458:organization & administration*; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled