HLL has been working with the Victorian Cancer Registry for the past 18 months to develop a pipeline for processing radiology reports. On the 8th April, HLL delivered the last version of the software. TumourTExtract (TTE) is a unique solution to automatically identifying cancer reports from a radiology information system at an imaging service, separating the cancer reports and sending them to the cancer registry. Subsequently, they enter a pipeline of two classifiers that determine tumour stream and purpose of the report, followed by identification of 19 variables about the progression of the cancer. The clinical language processing features a solution that involved manually tagging over 8000 reports from 3 pilot sites with 1.1 million tags to build a reliable semantic extraction and inference engine. The pilot sites were Lake Imaging, Ballarat, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne, and Westmead Hospital, Sydney in conjunction with the Cancer Institute of NSW.
This ground breaking research gives a clear indication that clinical language processing has come of age and that much more information will be extractable from radiology reports for reuse by many different clinical interests.
HLL is happy to be leading the health industry into new methods for achieving the processing of Big Data.
Read more about HLL and TTE on the Cancer Council Victoria website.