1/13/14: Sumithra Velupillai


Shades of Certainty -- Working with Swedish Medical Records

Sumithra Velupillai
Division of Biomedical Informatics
UCSD

Abstract. Different levels of knowledge certainty, or factuality levels, are expressed in clinical health record documentation. This information is currently not fully exploited, as the subtleties expressed in natural language cannot easily be machine analyzed. 

Two annotated corpora have been created for capturing speculations and uncertainties in Swedish medical records. One model distinguishes certain and uncertain expressions on a sentence level, and is applied on medical documentation from several clinical departments. Differences between clinical practices are also studied. More fine-grained certainty level distinctions are presented in a second model, with two polarities along with three levels of certainty, and is applied on a diagnostic statement level from an emergency department. Overall agreement results for both models are promising, but differences are seen depending on clinical practice, the definition of the annotation task and the level of domain expertise among the annotators. 

Using annotated resources for automatic classification of certainty levels is also studied by employing machine learning techniques. Encouraging overall results using local context information are obtained. The fine-grained certainty level model is also used for building classifiers for coarser-grained, real-world e-health scenarios, showing that fine-grained annotations can be used for several e-health scenario tasks. 

This talk will also present ongoing research on Swedish medical records and the Stockholm EPR Corpus from the Clinical Text Mining Group at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University. 

Sumithra Velupillai, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral researcher at UCSD, coming from the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. She has been awarded an international postdoctoral fellowship from the Swedish Research Council along with a Fulbright scholarship, in which she will base a majority of her research at UCSD during 2014-2015. She successfully defended her Thesis "Shades of Certainty – Annotation and Classification of Swedish Medical Records" on April 27th, 2012. Velupillai has participated in several national and international research projects, among others the Interlock project - a research collaboration between Stockholm University and DBMI at UCSD. Velupillai has a background in Computational Linguistics and specializes in research covering Language Technology, Information Access and Extraction, and Health Informatics.

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