Cited by 101Biomedical Text Mining and OntologiesMachine Learning in HealthcareTopic Modeling

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

Open access
Wu, Honghan, Wang, Minhong, Wu, Jinge, Francis, Farah, Chang, Yun-Hsuan, Shavick, Alex, Dong, Hang, Poon, Michael T. C. +15 more·2022·npj Digital Medicine

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.

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  • Existing natural language processing (NLP) methods to convert free-text clinical notes into structured data often require problem-specific annotations and model training.

    “Existing natural language processing (NLP) methods to convert free-text clinical notes into structured data often require problem-specific annotations and model training.”
  • A significant obstacle to developing traditional medical NLP algorithms is the limited existence of human-annotated datasets and the costs associated with new human annotation.

    “However, a significant obstacle to developing these traditional medical NLP algorithms is the limited existence of human-annotated datasets and the costs associated with new human annotation15.”

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Authors
Wu, H., Wang, M., Wu, J., Francis, F., Chang, Y.-H., Shavick, A., Dong, H., Poon, M. T. C., Fitzpatrick, N., Levine, A. P., Slater, K. T., Handy, A., Karwath, A., Gkoutos, G. V., Chelala, C., Shah, A. D., Stewart, R., Collier, N., Alex, B., Whiteley, W., Sudlow, C., Roberts, A., & Dobson, R. J. B.
Affiliations
  • University College London (GB)
  • University of Edinburgh (GB)
  • University of Oxford (GB)
  • University of Birmingham (GB)
  • Queen Mary University of London (GB)
  • King's College London (GB)
  • University of Cambridge (GB)
Corresponding author
Wu, Honghan
Venue
npj Digital Medicine
Published
2022-12-21
Volume
5
Issue
1
Pages
186-186
ISSN
2398-6352 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4312113143
Cited by
101
References
157
Citations by year
2026: 29 · 2025: 40 · 2024: 18 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 1
FWCI
1.87
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • npj Digital Medicine (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • ENLIGHTEN (Jurnal Bimbingan dan Konseling Islam) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
  • University of Birmingham Research Portal (University of Birmingham) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • Apollo (University of Cambridge) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • Apollo
  • Apollo (cc-by)
Funders
  • DH | National Institute for Health Research (NIHR202639)
  • British Council (UCL-NMU-SEU International Collaboration)
  • University of Edinburgh (The Advanced Care Research Centre Programme)
  • RCUK | Medical Research Council (MR/W014386, National Text Analytics Project)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Machine Learning in Healthcare
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
Keywords
clinical natural language processing, clinical research funding, research funding trends, disease phenotyping, clinical text mining, research collaboration networks, academia-industry collaboration, United Kingdom

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