UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

A survey on clinical natural language processing in the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2022

Wu, Honghan; Wang, Minhong; Wu, Jinge; Francis, Farah; Chang, Yun-Hsuan; Shavick, Alex; Dong, Hang; ... Dobson, Richard JB; + view all (2022) A survey on clinical natural language processing in the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2022. npj Digital Medicine , 5 , Article 186. 10.1038/s41746-022-00730-6. Green open access

[thumbnail of s41746-022-00730-6.pdf]
Preview
PDF
s41746-022-00730-6.pdf - Published Version

Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

Much of the knowledge and information needed for enabling high-quality clinical research is stored in free-text format. Natural language processing (NLP) has been used to extract information from these sources at scale for several decades. This paper aims to present a comprehensive review of clinical NLP for the past 15 years in the UK to identify the community, depict its evolution, analyse methodologies and applications, and identify the main barriers. We collect a dataset of clinical NLP projects (n = 94; £ = 41.97 m) funded by UK funders or the European Union's funding programmes. Additionally, we extract details on 9 funders, 137 organisations, 139 persons and 431 research papers. Networks are created from timestamped data interlinking all entities, and network analysis is subsequently applied to generate insights. 431 publications are identified as part of a literature review, of which 107 are eligible for final analysis. Results show, not surprisingly, clinical NLP in the UK has increased substantially in the last 15 years: the total budget in the period of 2019-2022 was 80 times that of 2007-2010. However, the effort is required to deepen areas such as disease (sub-)phenotyping and broaden application domains. There is also a need to improve links between academia and industry and enable deployments in real-world settings for the realisation of clinical NLP's great potential in care delivery. The major barriers include research and development access to hospital data, lack of capable computational resources in the right places, the scarcity of labelled data and barriers to sharing of pretrained models.

Type: Article
Title: A survey on clinical natural language processing in the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2022
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1038/s41746-022-00730-6
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-022-00730-6
Language: English
Additional information: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Medical Sciences > Cancer Institute
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Health Informatics
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Medical Sciences > Cancer Institute > Research Department of Pathology
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Health Informatics > Clinical Epidemiology
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10162397
Downloads since deposit
32Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item