For us healthcare professionals, there is a lot of interest and excitement around Natural Language Processing. Why? Let's dig in... :D
What is it?
Incredibly, this includes both text and spoken words... I know what you're thinking -
Can this beasty scrape and summate patient notes?
What about auto recording of clinics?
Of course it can, and much much more - in fact a lot of companies are trying to (and actually have already) built software that does it.
But what data can I use?
Ah, glad you asked! One of the big(gest) challenges is access to the data to train our models on and test our innovations. As anyone who has ever tried to access patient data in the NHS for any kind of project, you might as well be trying to steal the federal gold reserves whilst they have been securely imprisoned on an island off the coast of San Francisco, with a ring of fire around it.
(Yes I used American references for wealth and Alcatraz, but I don't know of the UK's equivalent, so I threw in a British authors book title :D - You're welcome Harry potter fans).
However, access to data in the NHS is an entire beasty of its own, one with many challenges and layers and I shall most definitely be coming to this in detail in another post.
Okay, so NLP, what am are people trying to do with it?
Make something cool obviously, and lots of people are. Myself included.
Right now, my plan is to build an AI chatbot system for patients and doctors.
For the patients, I want it to link to appropriate (and evidence based trusted resources), so when they want to ask a question about their breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, it's actually accurate - citing reliable resources such as Macmillan or Cancer Research UK.
(Instead of the google pot luck, that can get the opinion of "Storm from Cheshire" who has proved with several friends that CBD oil is a more effective cure for all cancers than any kind of chemotherapy. That, or the "medically proven research that doctors simply don't want you to know about", telling you that this special mix of black pepper and turmeric will stop cancer spreading, and it's now on sale for only £30 a pot. Bargain.)
For Doctors, it will provide updated information on diagnosis, treatment and guidelines again from reputable sources. So no longer should we need to scrape the respective guidelines and British national formulary for information on our prescriptions. We just ask my AI bot :) What an idea... if only 300 million other people weren't trying to do the same thing.
So what now?
It's early days but in the upcoming posts I'll be taking you through my journey of development step by step. I'll be using an open source technology called 'haystack by deep set'. (An extremely cool open source large language model framework), a backend of Django, frontend framework REACT, and giving a few Python and Linux tutorials along the way... I'm looking forward to it! Hope to see you there :D
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