UC Irvine Incorporates Natural Language Processing Into Data Science Platform

The University of California, Irvine (UCI) has partnered with artificial intelligence (AI) software company Melax Tech to enable UCI researchers to analyze EHR data using natural language processing (NLP).

NLP is the branch of AI that aims to enable computers to process and “understand” human language in the form of text or voice data by combining computational linguistics with machine learning or deep learning. In healthcare and clinical research, NLP can be used to extract useable data from free-text sources like clinical notes, academic journal articles, and EHRs, which would otherwise be difficult to incorporate effectively into research or the care continuum.

Under this partnership, UCI will incorporate Melax Tech’s NLP products into the UCI Health Data Science Platform, allowing researchers to analyze free-text clinical data found in EHRs. The press release states that initial NLP research will focus on improving patient safety and outcomes within the health system.

"There has been a strong desire among UCI researchers to have the capability to analyze free-text clinical narrative data using cutting-edge NLP technologies,” said Kai Zheng, chief research information officer at UCI Health Affairs, in a press release. “We are delighted to have this opportunity to work with Melax Tech to deploy their AI-driven annotation and analytics tools to help our researchers advance their research agenda by leveraging the vast amount of free-text data that our health system has accumulated in the past two decades."

The researchers will use Melax Tech’s LANN tool to annotate clinical notes and train NLP models, as well as the company’s CLAMP tool to develop and customize models with various rules and features for clinical information extraction, according to the press release. The collaboration will also help validate any resulting models using large-scale EHR datasets and provide additional research opportunities.

This partnership comes just a few months after UCI announced its AI-driven Institute for Precision Health and reflects a growing interest in using NLP in various aspects of healthcare, from research to revenue cycle management.

Last year, researchers used NLP to understand the relationship between pre-existing conditions and COVID-19 complications by sifting through unstructured EHR data for patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in 2020.

In April, researchers explored how NLP methods have been used to better understand bipolar disorder and identified opportunities for further NLP use, including investigating risk-taking and gender representation in online bipolar disorder populations.

In addition, Crisis Text Line, a nonprofit organization that provides free, 24/7 text-based mental health support, published its third annual national data report in June, which relied on NLP to highlight trends in youth mental health. The report revealed that millions are experiencing anxiety and grief.