The methodology of facilitating data analysis in medical informatics -information extraction from free-text data and structural data collection through the structure report interface

Clinical data consist of abundant patients data such as operation notes, diagnosis, and various examination reports. These clinical data may contain a rich source of valuable information. If we can further analyze the clinical data, then the useful knowledge may be obtained from the huge amount of medical data.
In general, the clinical data can be divided into two types: the structuralized data and the non-structuralized data. For the structuralized data, the data can be analyzed by computer directly, however, the non-structuralized data need to be additionally processed and extracted before the further studying. Therefore the major problem we want to solve is how to structuralize the clinical data. We adopt two ways to fulfill the target for structuralizing data.
1. Reports in the future: A Structure Report Interface is designed for collecting liver cancer clinical data by this interface.
2. Clinical documents in the past: The Data Extraction Assistant System is designed for extracting useful information from the medical free-text report.
Through the combination of these two functions, physicians can structuralize liver cancer clinical data and we hope the system can facilitate the study relevant to liver cancer