title: SEMCARE: Multilingual Semantic Search in Semi-Structured Clinical Data.
abstract: The vast amount of clinical data in electronic health records constitutes a great potential for secondary use. However, most of this content consists of unstructured or semi-structured texts, which is difficult to process. Several challenges are still pending: medical language idiosyncrasies in different natural languages, and the large variety of medical terminology systems. In this paper we present SEMCARE, a European initiative designed to minimize these problems by providing a multi-lingual platform (English, German, and Dutch) that allows users to express complex queries and obtain relevant search results from clinical texts. SEMCARE is based on a selection of adapted biomedical terminologies, together with Apache UIMA and Apache Solr as open source state-of-the-art natural language pipeline and indexing technologies. SEMCARE has been deployed and is currently being tested at three medical institutions in the UK, Austria, and the Netherlands, showing promising results in a cardiology use case.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Documentation, Medical University of Graz, Austria.
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: López-García
authors.affiliation: Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Documentation, Medical University of Graz, Austria.
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kreuzthaler
authors.affiliation: Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Documentation, Medical University of Graz, Austria.
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schulz
authors.affiliation: Division of Cardiology Department of Medicine, Medical University of Graz, Austria.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Scherr
authors.affiliation: Averbis GmbH, Freiburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Philipp
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Daumke
authors.affiliation: Averbis GmbH, Freiburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Kornél
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Markó
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Jan A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Kors
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Erik M
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: van Mulligen
authors.affiliation: St. George's University of London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Xinkai
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: St. George's University of London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Hanney
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Gonna
authors.affiliation: St. George's University of London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Elijah
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Behr
authors.affiliation: SYNAPSE Research Management Partners S.L.
authors.forename: Ángel
authors.initials: Á
authors.lastname: Honrado
mesh_terms: D057225:Data Mining / Q000379:methods*; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics / Q000379:methods; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D012660:Semantics