The system processes free-text clinical radiology reports and automatically generates structured records about the findings contained therein.
Structured reports are clinically useful for decision support and outcomes research.
The NLP system uses various statistical and machine learning methods to process the records and identify the properties, locations and diagnostic interpretations of each finding mentioned in the text. Fathom is a Wirm-based application that supports the UCLA researchers as they test the effectiveness of various NLP algorithms. In order to evaluate the recall and precision of the NLP engine, the results must be compared to thousands of hand-coded candidates. Fathom reads the candidates from the NLP engine and presents them in web forms to the domain experts, who are able to submit their judgments from any location. In addition, Fathom provides a Patient Record Manager that imports records from the hospital information system, allowing authorized users to retrieve records by patient demographics or by experiment corpus.