Fatiha Barigou

Using a Cellular Automaton to Extract Medical Information from Clinical Reports

An important amount of clinical data concerning the medical history of a patient is in the form of clinical reports that are written by doctors. They describe patients, their pathologies, their personal and medical histories, findings made during interviews or during procedures, and so forth. They represent a source of precious information that can be used in several applications such as research information to diagnose new patients, epidemiological studies, decision support, statistical analysis, and data mining. But this information is difficult to access, as it is often in unstructured text form. To make access to patient data easy, our research aims to develop a system for extracting information from unstructured text. In a previous work, a rule-based approach is applied to a clinical reports corpus of infectious diseases to extract structured data in the form of named entities and properties. In this paper, we propose the use of a Boolean inference engine, which is based on a cellular automaton, to do extraction. Our motivation to adopt this Boolean modeling approach is twofold: first optimize storage, and second reduce the response time of the entities extraction.

Using Local Grammar for Entity Extraction from Clinical Reports

Information Extraction (IE) is a natural language processing (NLP) task whose aim is to analyze texts written in natural language to extract structured and useful information such as named entities and semantic relations linking these entities. Information extraction is an important task for many applications such as bio-medical literature mining, customer care, community websites, and personal information management. The increasing information available in patient clinical reports is difficult to access. As it is often in an unstructured text form, doctors need tools to enable them access to this information and the ability to search it. Hence, a system for extracting this information in a structured form can benefits healthcare professionals. The work presented in this paper uses a local grammar approach to extract medical named entities from French patient clinical reports. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieved an F-Measure of 90. 06%.

The Use of Arabic WordNet in Arabic Information Retrieval

Research and experimentation using Arabic WordNet in the field of information retrieval are relatively new. It is limited compared to the research that has been done using Princeton WordNet. This work attempts to study the impact of Arabic WordNet on the performance of Arabic information retrieval. We extend Lucene with Arabic WordNet to expand users queries. The major contribution of this study is to propose an interactive query expansion IQE methodology using the words part-of-speech, according to the part it plays in a query. First, the user selects the appropriate part of speech for each term in the original query, and then he reselects the appropriate synonyms. Experimental results show that our IQE strategy produces a good Mean Average Precision MAP, it is able to improve MAP by 12.6%, but no variant of automatic query expansion AQE strategies did. Nevertheless, the experiments allow us to conclude that with an appropriate use of Arabic WordNet as a source of linguistic information for AQE can improve effectiveness for Arabic information retrieval.

Information Extraction in the Medical Domain

Information Extraction IE is a natural language processing NLP task whose aim is to analyse texts written in natural language to extract structured and useful information such as named entities and semantic relations between them. Information extraction is an important task in a diverse set of applications like bio-medical literature mining, customer care, community websites, personal information management and so on. In this paper, the authors focus only on information extraction from clinical reports. The two most fundamental tasks in information extraction are discussed; namely, named entity recognition task and relation extraction task. The authors give details about the most used rule/pattern-based and machine learning techniques for each task. They also make comparisons between these techniques and summarize the advantages and disadvantages of each one.

Sentiment Analysis at Document Level

Sentiment analysis becomes a very active research area in the text mining field. It aims to extract people’s opinions, sentiments, and subjectivity from the texts. Sentiment analysis can be performed at three levels: at document level, at sentence level and at aspect level. An important part of research effort focuses on document level sentiment classification, including works on opinion classification of reviews. This survey paper tackles a comprehensive overview of the last update of sentiment analysis at document level. The main target of this survey is to give nearly full image of sentiment analysis techniques at this level. In addition, some future research issues are also presented.

Lattice-Cell : Hybrid Approach for Text Categorization

In this paper, we propose a new text categorization framework based on Concepts Lattice and cellular automata. In this framework, concept structure are modeled by a Cellular Automaton for Symbolic Induction (CASI). Our objective is to reduce time categorization caused by the Concept Lattice. We examine, by experiments the performance of the proposed approach and compare it with other algorithms such as Naive Bayes and k nearest neighbors. The results show performance improvement while reducing time categorization.

Handling Negation to Improve Information Retrieval from French Clinical Reports

The aim of this work is to develop a framework to cope with the negative context in French clinical reports and assess the effect of negation identi cation on the performance of medical information retrieval. The proposed work significantly improves the performance of information retrieval done on French clinical reports where the precision improves by 10%.

Query expansion using medical information extraction for improving information retrieval in French medical domain

Many users’ queries contain references to named entities, and this is particularly true in the medical field. Doctors express their information needs using medical entities as they are elements rich with information that helps to better target the relevant documents. At the same time, many resources have been recognized as a large container of medical entities and relationships between them such as clinical reports; which are medical texts written by doctors. In this paper, we present a query expansion method that uses medical entities and their semantic relations in the query context based on an external resource in OWL. The goal of this method is to evaluate the effectiveness of an information retrieval system to support doctors in accessing easily relevant information. Experiments on a collection of real clinical reports show that our approach reveals interesting improvements in precision, recall and MAP in medical information retrieval.

Document Level Sentiment Analysis: A survey

Sentiment analysis becomes a very active research area in the text mining field. It aims to extract peoples opinions, sentiments, and subjectivity from the texts. Sentiment analysis can be performed at three levels: at document level, at sentence level and at aspect level. An important part of research effort focuses on document level sentiment classification, including works on opinion classification of reviews. This survey paper tackles a comprehensive overview of the last update of sentiment analysis at document level. The main target of this survey is to give nearly full image of sentiment analysis application, challenges and techniques at this level. In addition, some future research issues are also presented.

A Rule-Based Computer-Aided System for Managing Home Accidents in Childhood

Home accidents are one of the leading causes of death among children worldwide. First aids can in these situations help to initiate early treatment, which in turn may prevent death. Measures to improve emergency and medical treatment in the early phase may therefore help to save lives and reduce suffering. Home accidents require immediate attention but in Algeria, the problem is that majority of hospitals is usually concentrated around the urban areas and rural areas lack of emergency centers. In such situations, the parents must provide first aid until help arrives or carry the child to the nearest emergency center. Unfortunately, the first aid knowledge level among the parents is lower than expected. Therefore, the study aims to assist parents to the most common first aid emergency situations. We proposed a web-based expert system for the management of home accidents in collaboration with the pediatric intensive care unit of Oran’s Hospital.