Integrated Decision Support by Combining Textual Information Extraction, Facetted Search and Information Visualisation

Abstract

This work focusses on our integration steps of complex and partly unstructured medical data into a clinical research database with subsequent decision support. Our main application is an integrated facetted search tool, followed by information visualisation based on automatic information extraction results from textual documents. We describe the details of our technical architecture (open-source tools), to be replicated at other universities, research institutes, or hospitals. Our exemplary use case is nephrology, where we try to answer questions about the temporal characteristics of sequences and gain significant insight from the data for cohort selection. We report on this case study, illustrating how the application can be used by a clinician and which questions can be answered.