On November 14, 2016, Dr. Kevin Bretonnel Cohen of the University of Colorado（CU, gave a lecture with the theme of Clinical Text and Big Data in which he comprehensively introduced the challenges and opportunities of natural language processing in biomedical text mining.

Dr. Cohen is the director of the Biomedical Text Mining Project at the CU School of Medicine. He is also the chairman of the CU ’s Computational Linguistics, the focus of which is on biomedical natural language processing. Dr. Cohen, a specialist in natural language processing, with special emphasis in the field of biomedical natural language processing, authored the book entitled Biomedical Natural Language Processing, which provides valuable insights into the area of biomedical text processing.

With a view to surmounting the challenges in biomedicine, biomedical text mining in the context of big data, featuring the combination of natural language processing and big data technology, enjoys broad application prospects. Dr. Cohen pointed out that the research faces tremendous challenges, since its subject is unstructured data. He elaborated on some essential differences between biomedical literature data, clinical medicine and electronic medical records. Finally, he raised several examples of inspirational approaches for interested researchers.

After Dr. Cohen’s presentation, the attendees had an in-depth discussion with him on issues concerning machine learning algorithms, methods and ideas of unstructured data processing, and problems encountered in data mining of electronic medical records.

http://news.hzau.edu.cn/2016/1116/47463.shtml

(By Zou Xiaofang)